Don’t make your characters stereotypes

Make him real, not a stereotype

I’m a woman, so I must like shopping, shoes and soaps. I must hate football, not know the offside rule and how to fix things. And of course, I abhor bad language as it offends my feminine sensibilities.

In reality, shopping is my idea of hell, I hate shoes and wear trainers all the time because I walk a lot and soaps, well as though I am as susceptible to big storylines as anyone, I can take or leave them.

I don’t just love football, I was a football journalist for years and I am the one who fixes things in our house.

I also (shamefaced) have done quite a bit of swearing in my time. Well, put it this way, if there was a swear box in our house, I’d be putting a heck of a lot more in it than my boyfriend.

Are you a stereotype? Chances are you probably are not. So, why should your characters be?

Make them different. Make them stand out. They can even be a contradiction. For instance, in the Harlan Coben Byron Molitar books his friend Win Lockwood looks like a soft rich boy, but he’s a violent man and a master in various martial arts.

Myron’s business partner Esperanza is a small, pretty Latino lady but she used to be a professional wrestler known as Pocahontas in the Fabulous Ladies of Wrestling.

Whatever you do, DO NOT make them a stereotype; don’t generalise.

Real life people aren’t stereotypes and you want to breathe life into your characters.  

Sometimes successful writers suck too…

Sometimes it’s so hard when you are struggling to get your first novel published to remember that even successful writers had their doubts too and weren’t always as good as they are now.

Take Harlan Coben for instance.  One of the best selling authors in the world, and the creator of the fantastic Myron Bolitar, I recently had the misfortune to read a book he wrote in his twenties and just recently had published.  Called Play Dead, it’s simply one of the worst books I have ever attempted to read.  I say attempted because after huffing and puffing through 100 pages, I decided life was way too short and put it down.

What was wrong with it?  I wouldn’t say it was badly written, but the main character the most beautiful woman in the world and her sports star husband, were too cardboard cut out for me.  I couldn’t empathise with them. 

Another book I simply could not finish, was one of Jeffery Deaver’s first.  Called Mistress of Justice, it was appalling.  This was meant to be have been ‘reworked’ some 13 years after it was published.  Yet, it was the first book of his I had to put down without finishing. 

As a writer, what have I learnt from reading bad books by good authors?

First off, you need believable characters.  They need to have a degree of likeability if they are people you want to suceed in whatever their chosen goal is.  Whether its finding a missing husband or child, running a marathon or solving a murder case.

Second of all, maybe even good authors need to get all the garbage out of their systems before they get to the good stuff.