I think I am genuinely starting to feel sorry for the people who read my books… You know… When I eventually get around to publishing them.
This is because I am genuinely fascinated (And arroused) by complicated characters…
Like a series I am.reading at the moment, The Game is Life by Terry Schott (If you havent heard of it I would very much recommend reading it) all of the characters are fairly normal human beings and others less so but my favourate is a man named Carl.
Mr Schott has a bizarre habit of mixing kind of boring everyday names like Brandon, with really ancient and convoluted ones like Azrael. But normally I end up disling characters with boring names…
This rule however is not true of Carl, for him the name works. I had a bully when I was in school called Carl which might have something to do with it. But other than that for the first time in probably forever, the name is not as important as who he is.
He is an arsehole, but the reason I like him so much is because he is a complicated arsehole.
To cut a long story short and to avoid issues with copyright, essentially he spends a long time hunting the main characters, kills one, leaves the other one to hunt him, plays it as sport that she has tried to kill him so often and failed, then there is one humanisin g moment where she comes to kill him and he realises that he is in love with her.
He is hard ass and so refuses to show much emotion when he figures this out but still…
Even if Terry Schott writes the rest of the series without much more character development, I will still give him five stars on account of this very moment…
I may only just be shy of something like 200,000 words down in the series but this one moment shows that he really should keep writing.
Not that my oppinion means very much as I am just me and as over-inflated as my ego may be sometimes I am fully aware that my oppinion basically means diddly.
Side Note: It has some bad reviews as it seems like it was put together rather quickly and without an editor but it is so worth the time and effort to read if you can.
Anyway, circling back around to the point I wanted to make at the start of this post…
Complicated characters are awesome.
Due to the nature of who I am as a human being I am always thinking about peoples reasons for doing things, what drives them to act in a certain way, what makes them lie, etcetera…
So it makes sense that I want to make my characters more cerebral and complicated, internal (And external) struggles are the birthplace of dreams.
Everyone notices external struggles, people putting the hours in at work or on the field, but it is hard to not notice the physical pain people go through.
But so few people notice the internal struggle… Not that I am saying that we haven’t gotten better at this and it makes sense as we have only really started to pay attention to the physical needs of others in the past 200 years or so.
So it will come, in time. Just the progress is slow and frustrating.
(Just like this bus journey… Slow and tedious, uselessly so…)
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