Me And My Love Of Traumatized Characters. (If You Have Any Doubt That I Am Horribly Cruel To My Characters, Please Read Consequence And Amend)

In the first novel I completed, there was a character called Maeve. Maeve was strong, she was tough, and she was fragile. An odd combination, right? Today, I realized that almost all of my favourite characters have that combination, they spring from the same archetype: the Archetype of the “Damaged” Character. In each book I’ve written, my favourite characters are those who have been hurt in some way.

And before anyone jumps to any conclusions, I am not a sadist; I do not love causing my characters pain. Well, I do sometimes, but we’re not going to talk about that right now.

The reason I’ve always been drawn to the Archetype of the Damaged Character is because those characters possess the most strength, and they possess the most vulnerability.

I’m currently writing my eighth novel, so I have created a lot of fictional characters in my time. But out of all of these characters, my favourite is Phoenix, from CONSEQUENCE. She wasn’t originally meant to be a Traumatized Character.

Originally, Phoenix was meant to be a fairly minor character. Her sole purpose was to be a bright, happy friend for Persephone. Yeah, look how that turned out. The moment I started writing her into the story, Phoenix changed from how she was in my head.

Some characters just have a story to tell, and they make sure that I tell it. And some characters don’t just make sure I tell their story, they plant themselves in my brain until they are 100 per cent certain that I will write what they want. Then, when the first two books in a trilogy are published, this joyful little character will helpfully suggest all the things I could have done differently.

In AMEND, there were two scenes that were my favourites to write. SPOILER ALERT! One of these was when Abynechka got turned into a warthog. Phoenix and I were both like “Justice! Yeah!” and the other scene was when Katya kills Jakov.

If I had to choose one favourite scene, I would choose the latter. Why? Because it is when Phoenix is at her strongest, yet her most vulnerable. She has to choose between almost-certain-death and her husband killing someone to save her.

Phoenix likes people to be perfect. This is ironic, given the fact that she is very far from perfect. Kai is the closest thing to perfect that Phoenix has ever found, and if Kai were to kill someone, it would mar that perfection.

For the first fourteen years of her life, all that Phoenix had was herself. And so, she is very protective of herself, and often holds people at arm’s length. But she loves Kai more than she loves herself, and so this scene is the hardest part of the book for her.

Phoenix has to choose between her own well-being, and Kai’s. And she chooses him. She chooses him because he’s her saviour, because he made her life better. And she chooses him because she loves him.

This scene is also proof of Phoenix’s growth throughout the trilogy. Had she been in the same situation, but at the beginning of CONSEQUENCE, she would have saved herself, without even thinking about it.

Perhaps the thing I like most about Traumatized Characters is that I can attempt to heal them. For example, by bringing in the character of Kai, I managed to heal Phoenix ~ or at least, start to heal her. She doesn’t really recover from what happened to her when she was younger until the end of TRANSCEND.

In the book I am currently writing, I have a character called Adelajda (Pronounced ah-de-LIE-dah.) She also fits into the Damaged Character Archetype. She’s a former slave, has anxiety issues, and is falling in love with her dead-half-sister’s boyfriend.

I’m currently writing the second book in a series of four. The first book was written in the first person of one character, Sage. But the second book alternates between three characters: Sage, Flynn, and Adelajda.

With the first book in this series, the characters weren’t in my head: at all. It kind of freaked me out, actually. I was like “what do I do? I’m so lost! I need my characters to tell me what to write”.

I eventually began to accept the fact that I would have to think of storylines myself, rather than relying on the apparently limited imaginations of my characters.

And then I started book two, and it was different. Okay, so my characters aren’t willing to give me any storylines, but they are being a little more vocal. Especially Adelajda.

Her original purpose was to be a very minor character that was in the first book for approximately two pages. Why does this appear to be a recurring theme? Why do my minor characters end up becoming protagonists?

Anyway, I liked her name, so I kept her in the story. Right from the beginning (or near-end, seeing as she didn’t come into the book until quite late on) I knew that she had a story to tell.

So I made her a protagonist in Book Number Two. And she’s actually the easiest character to write. My chapters are, on average, between two and three A4 pages long. I’ve only written one chapter from Adelajda’s perspective so far, but it was five pages long: double my average chapter length.

Two out of three of my current protagonists are Traumatized Characters (Flynn and Adelajda), and those are my two favourites. I like Sage, I do, but sometimes she’s a little bit…naïve, sarcastic, selfish, unthinking, and a whole bunch of other words that I can’t currently think of.

And she falls into my “Original Main Character Archetype”. The Original Main Character Archetype goes somewhat like this: naïve, lived a sheltered life, has never fallen in love before, thinks they can save the world, falls in love with one man who they get together with at approximately halfway through the first book, everybody thinks they’re a heroine who will change the crap-ness of the world they live in.

And, they are known as Original Main Characters, because they usually end up sharing the Main Character role with another, almost certainly traumatized, character.

I have had at least three main characters like that fit this archetype; two of which had another similarity: they both came from food-growing places (vineyard and Turnip Farms). Anyway, these main characters never fall into my Damaged Character Archetype. And, coincidentally, these characters are never my favourites. (The exception to that rule being a character that is in TRANSCEND, who I cannot talk about for reasons to do with giving away one of my biggest plot twists).

I think my overall favourite thing about the Damaged Character Archetype is that those characters have experienced intense emotional pain, and they have survived it. Which is why I tend to give those characters the more challenging storylines: because I know that they can handle it.

Book Number Seven.

This morning, at 01:26 a.m., I finished writing my seventh novel. The ending wasn’t what I had planned, or what I had expected, it just came to me from nowhere.

I always say that I think best in the early hours of the morning, but now I think that I don’t think better, I just think differently. An example of this being that I suddenly wondered why the dirt on Earth was called earth, yet the ground on the Moon wasn’t called moon. These are not things that I think at normal times of day. (Or maybe they are…)

When I finish a book, I tie up the loose ends; I work towards the happy ending, or tragic ending; whatever ending I’m looking for. For the first time, I left a book open ended.

I wasn’t sure why I chose to do this, especially seeing as the way I ended it may mean that nobody will want to publish it, but it was an ending that felt right. I didn’t say whether the world ended, or whether good defeated evil, because that wasn’t what the story was about.

What it was about was humans, and emotions, and the psychology of people, and how that tied in to the element/star sign that they were born under.

I think the underlying theme of all the books I write is: what does it mean to be human? In CONSEQUENCE, the theme was explored in terms of the definition of human. Persephone was SPOILER ALERT a robot, yet she was more human than a lot of the human characters.

In the book I finished last night, the theme was more about humanity; about the strengths and weaknesses of people. And also about the fine line between ordinary and extraordinary. These were people with magical powers, yet they were ordinary people in the deepest sense.

But the strangest thing about this ending was how easy it was to let it go. It’s been months since I finished the first draft of TRANSCEND, yet the characters from the trilogy aren’t quite gone from my head. The slightest thing can trigger their presence in my mind; can make them share their opinions.

Yet the characters from my last book are already gone. They weren’t in my head that much at all; perhaps that was why they were so quick to leave. Either way, it’s strange to have no characters in my mind. It’s also strange not knowing what to write next. All I know is….book number eight, here I come!