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!

A Movie/Song Quote, A Bunch Of Book Stuff, And Talking About Characters.

In the movie Music and Lyrics, there’s a line in a song which goes: ‘I need inspiration, not just another negotiation.’ That line describes how I often feel about my writing.

I end up at this stage of my book where I can’t go on; where I’m only writing out of obligation to the effort I’ve already put, rather than because I want to write.

In the last blog I wrote, I mentioned that I was trying to add to a book that I never finished. I have now written 45,600 and something words of that book.

At first I was typing stuff I’d already written, and then one day…the pages ran out. There was no more. But I continued, and so did the book.

I’m now at a stage where I have the rest of my storylines planned out. This is my least favourite stage of a book. What’s the point of writing when you know exactly what’s going to happen? Where’s the originality, the intrigue?

And with this book, there is another issue: the characters don’t seem to enjoy hanging out in my head.

With my trilogy, the characters were always in my head. The never left: at all. In fact, their most vocal times where either in the early hours of the morning, or when they disagreed with something someone said.

Those characters gave me storylines, and they kept me company. They also told me what to wear, what music to listen to, and that hot chocolate was better than coffee. My current characters don’t give me storylines, they don’t even object when I plot their deaths.

The most I get from my current characters is that they let me play out scenes in my head. But they never tell me how the book should go.

And my other characters are finally gone…for the most part. Except earlier, when I was watching some video of an Estonian dude, and Phoenix was in my head, being all Phoenixish and imitating him. (There are at least two scenes in CONSEQUENCE where Phoenix does an impression of someone, and they have an Estonian accent, she wanted to make sure she was doing it right).

I didn’t realize just how much I missed her until she was back. I remember the day after my mum read CONSEQUENCE for the first time, and she said; ‘Phoenix is basically you’. My initial reaction was one of horror. Phoenix was NOT me, she was this annoying character who couldn’t keep her mouth shut, and judged people, and made loads of mistakes.

In all honesty, I knew that Phoenix was like me from the moment I started writing chapter three. She wasn’t meant to be like me, but she ended up that way. And for a long time I pretended she wasn’t like me, even though she was.

In my current book, there aren’t any characters that are like me. The only things I have in common with my main character are that we are the same height, and we hate turnips. In fact, I’m sure half the idea for the book came from me staring at a turnip thinking how much I hated them. They just sit there, all pretentious, like: ‘Your mum’s going to put me in soup and you’re going to think I’m a potato, so you’ll eat me. Then you’ll realize I’m not a potato, but it will be too late by then. Ha!’ Seriously, those turnips are evil!

One of the things I do like about my book, though, is that when I’m writing it, I’m not myself. I go into the mind of Sage (my main character), and I stop sounding like me, I stop being like me, and I completely become her.

With characters like Phoenix, or the Tsar, and even Persephone, to some extent, there’s not a lot of differentiation between self and character. Phoenix is a lot like me, the Tsar is a lot like Phoenix and me, and Persephone tends to be around one or the other of them, so she’s almost reacting to me. There’s not so much…freedom.

I always say that I don’t “write what I know”, but in some ways, I guess I do. If my characters have aspects of myself (which most of the ones in CONSEQUENCE do), then I am technically writing what I know.

Except, I like to think that I am smarter than Phoenix. She may be a scientist, but she makes a hell of a lot of mistakes.

Hang on a sec; I just realized that Phoenix doesn’t believe in God. Technically, to her, I am God, because I am her creator. A figment of my imagination doesn’t believe in me? What?!

How did I write so much about Phoenix in this blog? It wasn’t meant to be about her…ugh, that girl/figment of my imagination is so manipulative!

It’s amazing how a few minutes of thinking about Phoenix can make me appreciate my current main character, who is now in my thoughts, which means I’m going to start talking about her.

So…my main character is called Sage, she’s sixteen years old, and she has a magical power that involves the element of fire. She’s really tall, like, me tall, so about 5’10”. And she’s the first character I’ve written in the first person that actually has a strong character presence. A lot of characters don’t have much personality when I write in the first person, but Sage does. And she hates turnips; I like it when my characters and I have something in common.

Sage looks a little bit like this:

Unfinished Books Which May One Day Be Finished.

Last night, I was sorting through one of the draws in my bedside table. This draw is generally a writing rubbish bin. It’s filled with old research notes, books I never finished, that kind of thing…

When I finished writing TRANSCEND, I started writing another book the next day. It was completely different from The Three Stages trilogy. For a start, it was straight-out fantasy, not science-fantasy. And it was in the first person. To this day, I have never finished a book written in the first person. I just can’t do it.

But I started reading through this book. And when I put it down at practically two o’clock in the morning, I wanted to know what happened next. But nothing happened next, cos I hadn’t finished it. And so I’ve decided to try to finish it.

Once I quit a book, I generally don’t bother with it again. But there’s something about this book that makes me want to write more.

The One Year Anniversary of When I Started Writing Consequence.

On this day, last year, I started writing a book.

I had no idea where the story was going. I had two characters, two settings, and a few basic storylines ideas.

I had gotten the idea the previous night, and started writing it in the first person. I failed after three or four pages.

So I started again that morning, though it was slightly different.

My original Persephone was tall with dark hair and green eyes. She was very different in personality from my actual Persephone, too.

Then I was talking to my sister about fictional characters, and she said that all female main characters these days tend to have brown hair.

So I changed how Persephone looked. She shifted in my mind, and starting looking like the actress Molly Quinn. (So red hair, blue eyes, blah blah blah)

And with the change of look, Persephone somehow changed personality. I’m not sure why, but it’s a good job that she did. Because my original Persephone would not have been stupid enough to do half the things my actual Persephone does ~ therefore, I wouldn’t have a story.

And I had another character. I was never that keen on the name Hades, so I knew right from the beginning that I would change his name to Haden. I knew how he would look right from the beginning. But I wasn’t quite sure what his personality would be.

I had Haden and Persephone, all I needed was a setting, a place for them to meet.

The vineyard had already came into mind the previous night, and I remembered something I’d heard somewhere about in China people only being allowed one child (I’m not sure if this is actually true, I just heard it on the radio or something). Obviously in China, they wouldn’t send kids to vineyards, but that was where I got the idea for the vineyard scheme.

So I had Persephone, who lived on a vineyard in Greece, and I had Haden, who I had no idea where he was from.

I’ve always had a fascination with Russia. (Not just cos my mum said on many occasions that it was a country she never wanted to go to.) And I decided that Moscow would be the “Underworld” that Persephone was taken to.

And in the original myth, the reason Persephone stays in the Underworld, is because she eats a pomegranate, and when you eat in the Underworld, you can never properly leave. That’s where the sci-fi element came in. I needed a way for fruit to control her.

Originally, it was going to be a retelling of the myth, rather than parallels between Persephone’s story and the myth, but most of my original ideas changed.

Here are some prime examples of things that were meant to happen that I thought better of:

Persephone was going to get together with Sol.

The Tsar was going to be gay.

Phoenix was meant to be a minor character. (Yeah, she’s in my head right now, laughing at me.)

Phoenix was meant to be a nice happy person without a past.

Phoenix’s only purpose was to be a friend for Persephone.

Persephone was meant to stay with the Tsar.

Phoenix was meant to die. (She put an end to this quickly. She never lets me kill her. Believe me; I have tried so many times.)

Melinoe wasn’t going to exist.

Melinoe was going to have a brother.

The reason Phoenix went to the settlements (the time she set them on fire) was because she had a boyfriend there that she wanted to check up on.

Phoenix wasn’t meant to be the settlement president’s daughter.

Persephone and Drew weren’t meant to SPOILER ALERT die.

So that would have been a very…different book. (And if you look carefully, you can see hints of storylines that never happened. I.e. when the Tsar’s talking to his father in the library, some of the things he says. Or how he reacts the first time Persephone kisses him. Or with Sol catching Persephone when she jumps out the window)

But my characters didn’t want it that way; they wanted me to write their stories, so I did.

I think the book started changing when I got my next two characters.

They popped into my head either the day I started writing, or the day after.

There was a boy. He was tall, with dark hair. He looked like a younger version of the guy who played Tom Riddle in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. This boy was Sol.

And there was a girl. She was short, with dark hair and blue-green eyes. She looked a lot like the actress Isabelle Fuhrman, but with a different hairstyle, and a different eye colour.

This was the character that changed the book.

The character that won’t leave my head, even after a year.

This character was Phoenix (who is trying to control what I’m writing, yet again).

Phoenix was so different from any character I’d written prior to that point.

She was so…energetic. She was practically bouncing off the walls in my head. She was so full of life, so…real.

That’s what I love/hate about her: that realness. Phoenix is the one character who always manages to get the storylines she wants. She gets the dramatic ones, the horrible disturbing ones. And she gets the occasional happy one, too.

When I combined Phoenix and Persephone, I didn’t realize that those characters would form such a strong bond.

When I was writing CONSEQUENCE, I didn’t realize quite what it was about. I once decided that when I’d finished it, I’d write a book about friendship. Not about good friendship, but about why the hell do people stay friends even when one person doesn’t communicate, when one person isn’t being an ideal friend.

I didn’t realize then that I had actually done that. Because CONSEQUENCE is about friendship. And love, and science, and loss. It’s about so much more than I ever thought it would be.

Before I wrote CONSEQUENCE, I was really miserable. And I think that perhaps that book cured me. It worked as a kind of therapy. And I think I learned a lot from my characters. Yes, the voices in my head/figments of my imagination actually taught me a lot about life.

And they still do, I guess. Though in the book I’m currently working on, there seem to be a few parallels with real life. I guess my subconscious mind likes to slip things into my books that aren’t actually meant to be there. I guess my subconscious mind has a lot in common with Phoenix.

Kai (and Phoenix), Perfect Characters and Imperfect Characters (Kai Being Perfect, Phoenix Being Imperfect.)

Out of all the male characters I have written, I have two favourites.

One is the Tsar. I didn’t understand him as a character until I was writing TRANSCEND. I couldn’t find out what motivated him, what made him who he was.

And the other character is Kai.

Most of the characters in CONSEQUENCE came into my head pretty early on. Kai wasn’t one of those characters.

He didn’t form straight away, but a little bit at a time. It was last summer when Kai came into my mind. I was writing CONSEQUENCE, and I had just gotten the idea for the Estonian Institute of Scientific Research (or EISR, as it’s mostly known as in the books). I knew that Phoenix would spend quite a bit of time there without Persephone, and I knew that she would need someone to keep her company.

A few ideas for characters ran through my mind, but none of them seemed…right. At least, not for Phoenix. She is the kind of character who is very picky about whom she’s friends with. And she is also the kind of character who will not hesitate to tell me that I’m writing the book wrong (or finding the wrong cover, using the wrong words, describing her the wrong way, making her react the wrong way, blah blah blah).

But Kai was perfect for Phoenix. They had stuff in common, but they were almost completely opposite.

Kai was almost perfect, and Phoenix…well, she was not perfect. She was so opinionated, and eccentric, and ALWAYS had to be right. (Oh wait, I think I just described myself…)

And Kai was like an antidote to that. He was calm and loving and peaceful. He was the kind of person who loved everybody equally. And Phoenix was the kind of person who loved a couple of people, and would be absolutely fine if everyone else in the world just disappeared.

And somehow, Kai (SPOILER ALERT!) loved Phoenix. Perhaps because she was so different from him. Or maybe because he admired her. (Phoenix tells me that she has lots of admirable qualities. She also tells me that I can’t contradict her on that, because she is always right).

Or maybe Kai didn’t have a choice…When Phoenix loves someone; she loves them with her whole self. They become her entire world. If someone was met with the full force of her love, it would be hard for them not to return that love.

Plus, Phoenix likes to get her own way. (Like, this blog was meant to be about Kai, yet, somehow, Phoenix seems to be mentioned almost as often as he is.) So if she wanted Kai to love her, he would.

Anyway, what was I saying before Phoenix hijacked my brain?

Oh yes, I was talking about Kai.

Out of my two favourite male characters, I think Kai is my actual favourite. Though sometimes I’m like “is he realistic? Is he too nice?”

In the book I’m currently writing, my main male character is not perfect. He is very far from perfect. This proves how far along my writing has come within the last year.

In CONSEQUENCE, I had three main(ish) male characters. The Tsar, who was kind of evil. Drew, who was near perfect. And Kai, who was even closer to perfect than Drew was.

The only flaw I could find in Kai was that he dated Abynechka just to make Phoenix jealous. Abynechka is actually named after a girl called Abi who was mean to me once, so I never liked her character very much. Neither did Phoenix, though that was obviously for different reasons. Jealous is an understatement of what Phoenix felt. There is a scene in AMEND which shows that Phoenix was still mad about it, even after about thirteen years.

I sometimes wonder if it’s fair that my male characters have hardly any flaws, yet my female characters have hundreds. But recently I’ve been thinking, if people can’t be perfect in books, when can they be?

Would people read a book if male characters were uncommunicative flirtaholic idiots who were too busy looking at themselves in the mirror to notice that one of the female characters had been looking at them for the past half hour?

I wouldn’t read a book like that.

Though I did realize ~ to my horror ~ that the one thing my three favourite male characters of all time had in common was that they all tried to strangle their girlfriends/future girlfriends.

Okay, so two out of three of them had been mind-controlled, and the third one didn’t realize at the time that he would later fall in love with the alien, but still…I was kind of like “If these are fictional guys that are nice…what are the not-nice ones like?”.

The thing I seem to always read about “perfect” characters, is that they’re too unrealistic, too cardboard cut-out ish. But if characters aren’t cardboard cut-out ish, then what’s wrong with them being perfect?

Fictional characters aren’t meant to be an exact replica of real people. They have to be themselves, and if they are meant to be really abnormally nice, well then that’s who they are.

And some books need characters like that. For example, if Kai didn’t exist, Phoenix would be ten times more annoying than she is when is being as annoying as it’s possible to be. (She isn’t always as annoying in the books as I say she is, but remember, I’ve had her in my head for nearly a year, so I know just how annoying she can be).

The relationship between Phoenix and Kai is one of my favourite things to write. It’s just interesting how love can change Phoenix; make her a better person (and sometimes a worse one). It’s very different from her love for Persephone, too. With Persephone, Phoenix loves her so much, but she doesn’t trust her completely. The ultimate level of Phoenix’s trust is when she trusts someone with herself.

Therefore, she trusts Kai more than Persephone. Even though she doesn’t like to talk to Kai about her friendship with Persephone ~ which implies that she doesn’t trust him quite as much as it appears. God, that girl is complicated!

In AMEND, Phoenix and Kai are married. They’ve been together for about thirteen years. And it’s really lovely to write ~ even though Phoenix is still insecure, which sometimes makes their relationship insecure.

But it’s also interesting to write just in terms of character development. I know about characters who develop on their own, but what about ones who develop together? It’s nice to see how Phoenix is when she has someone to depend on, someone who loves her for herself (despite her many, many flaws). She’s such a complex character, and being in love gives her a kind of simplicity.

The love between Phoenix and Kai is perhaps the strongest love in the whole trilogy. Yes, Persephone and Drew would die for each other. But Phoenix and Kai would live for each other. If Kai died, Phoenix wouldn’t kill herself. She would probably die of a broken heart, but she wouldn’t choose to die.

She loves Kai enough to know that he would want her to live.

And if it was the other way round, Kai would do the same.

There were several times in TRANSCEND where I was tempted to kill Phoenix. She was being particularly annoying, and I was getting rather sick of her. I’m glad that I didn’t kill her (not just cos she would be unbearable to have in my head).

But if I had killed Phoenix, what would have happened to Kai? Well, basically he wouldn’t be too great to have in my head, either (though he’s one of those lovely characters who has the decency to let me write what I want, rather than what they want).

And if I’d killed either of them, I would have lost one of my favourite storylines. So, I saw sense, and just fatally injured Phoenix. I think she’s almost forgiven me.

Another thing about my two favourite male characters: out of all the male characters, they are the ones that Phoenix has the strongest reaction to. Whether it’s extreme hatred towards the Tsar, or extreme love for Kai, those are two of the characters that she feels the most for.

Thoughts On Characters And Bravery.

In the books I read, having brave main characters is kind of a given. Most of my favourite books are futuristic/post-apocalyptic/dystopian. They contain these horrible worlds full of horrible things that the main characters try to overcome.

I never thought about my characters being brave. I knew that some of them were, but I never realized that almost all of them were.

By “brave” I don’t just mean risking their lives. I mean brave in so many different contexts. In who they are, in how they are, in what they believe in.

In Divergent (one of my all-time favourite books) there’s a line which goes “I never thought I would need bravery in the small moments of my life; I do”.  And I started thinking about that, and realized that it actually applies to a lot of fictional characters.

I always thought that if I lived in the worlds of the books I write ~ or the books I read ~ that I would be brave.

Three nights ago, I was standing on a chair, screaming; completely at the mercy of a dead mouse. I hate mice.

And thinking about it like that, I realized just how brave my characters are.

If someone even mentions the word “rat”, I start freaking out, yet my characters face things they fear on a daily basis. And they stay sane (sort of).

I spend so much time criticizing my characters, that I often forget to admire them.

There are characters like Persephone, who are brave because they would turn the world upside down for someone they love, or for something they believe in.

But there are characters that are brave in other ways. There’s Kai, who is brave enough to love Phoenix (that takes bravery, believe me).

And there’s Melinoe, the main character in AMEND.  When I was writing it, I never considered her to be brave. She was so cold, so sadistic/masochistic/horrible. But she is brave.

She went through so much, and she was mostly alone. Yes, that may have been because she alienated most of the people who cared for her, but that doesn’t make it easier.

Melinoe’s bravery came mostly in the last couple of paragraphs of the last chapter of AMEND. She lets her guard down, and perhaps that’s the bravest action of all.