Samhain Publishing Ltd Weblog

Characters to Root for

I had no idea what to write about for this blog. I just got back from a holiday, I’m exhausted and dealing with a jet lagged baby who won’t sleep at night, and I have all this work to catch up on. I was thinking about a gripping blog about needing a holiday after my holiday. Then as I was watching Bones, I turned to look at my little boy sitting on the floor with his back to me reading a book (or pretending to since I’m pretty sure he can’t read yet—pretty sure…). He looked so cute and skooshy and I thought how protective I am of him, how I’d do serious damage to anyone who even dared to hurt him. That got me to thinking about the heroines I write. And the heroes for that matter.

Every single one of them has a protective personality. Even if they don’t think of themselves as strong or protective, they all end up being just that.

In a way, that protective trait is a deep seeded part of my personality and I infuse that into my protagonists. I’m not saying any of my characters are me, but writers do use aspects of themselves, or traits they’d like to have, to help when building characters. Sometimes, we use traits that are exactly opposite to what we are to create interesting characters. But for the purposes of this blog, I’m just talking about the things we add that are part of ourselves, or traits we’d like to possess.

I think this is one of the things that started me writing. I wanted justice for those who couldn’t defend themselves. I wanted to write characters with the strength and bravery I hope I would have in their situations. I’m not always so sure I could live up to the heroines and heroes I write. I don’t think I have it in me, for example, to jump in front of a subway train and hold down a man having a seizure while the train screeches over the top of our heads (this is a true story; a man in NYC did this for another young man and I am completely in awe of his abundance of bravery). But I like to believe the stories give me a way to experience and act on my protective instincts, to do good, even if it’s only fictional.

With luck, I’ll never have to go through what a fictional hero or heroine does—let’s be honest, we writers beat up our main characters a lot in the process of getting them their happy endings. But being an author gives me the chance to write characters I can really root for. I hope it does the same for readers. And I hope readers will see a little of themselves and their own bravery in my characters. It’s good to remember how strong we really are.