Of Characters and Defining Incidents

I’m a little more than halfway through the Presents I’m working on right now, and I’m loving the characters. They’re so fun and they’re giving me a lot to work with. The hero is coming from a very strong place. His past, it was woe and horrible and it has left him with SHAME and ISSUES. And that shame and those issues can be traced easily back to a defining incident in his life.

This makes things nice and clear for me. I know what changed for him, I know why, I know what it is that haunts his success and makes it all feel like…well, like woe and shame still.

My heroine, on the other hand, was murky. I thought…well, she’s a geek so she feels a bit out of step. Because she wasn’t popular etc. So I was talking with a critique partner about her and said ‘yeah, but how did her parents make her feel?”

Me: I don’t know. I think they were nice.

J: But why does she feel SO inadequate then? Even now? Doesn’t she need something that confirmed it for her?

Me: Nah. She’s a geek.

Well, at that point my editor read my outline and said: So when did your heroine decide binary was safer than people?

Me: >.> because she did. Because she’s good at it. *sighs* *goes off to figure it out*

Well then, ironically, the same CP, who is probably going to blog about this too, had a similar issue. (people who live in glass houses should not throw stones, Ms. Ashenden!) There was a point in her hero’s life where he’d changed, but she wasn’t sure why. Because, like me, she thought, isn’t it enough that he just had a rough life so one day he…walked away from it different?

And in real life, it probably is enough. In some books it probably is too. But particularly in a shorter format book, I think the defining incident is something you simply can’t leave out.

I had done this a few books ago too. Similar type of heroine. She was artsy and clumsy and had just decided she didn’t ‘fit’. But the why of it was vague. It wasn’t until I arrived at a specific moment in her past that had made her decide: Hey, I don’t fit, and I’m not trying anymore, that she really became solid in my mind and in the book.

And it’s the same with this book. I had a funny, backward way of figuring this one out, though. So after being told by two people, hey, your heroine’s conflict is not good enough, was thinking about it while doing something in the kitchen and a piece of dialogue popped into my head. It’s not from the beginning or the middle, it’s from the end. And it was the heroine telling the hero why she’s not going to live her life the way she’s been living it. How she’s not hiding who she is anymore.

And it was finding THAT, finding where my heroine needed to end up, that helped me find her beginning, and how she chose to cope with the way her friends and family made her feel about herself. Finding that moment she decided once and for all that she could be herself, she had to hide herself so she could fit in. And now she has a goal she’s headed for. She’s headed for freedom. And I know how to get her there now! (much easier when you know where your character is going!)

What about you? Do you find it easier to work with characters who are a certain way now because of a defining moment in their past? As a reader, do you find it easier to connect with a character who changed because of a specific incident?