The Characters of The Green Dress

While many people in my life keep coming and telling me they know who the characters of The Green Dress are based on, I just smile and laugh because I know better. Yes, there are details I have taken from people but Audrey and Vince are not Greg and I (nor did I have a rich aunt who left me a lot of money and a house with a pool). In fact Greg one day said to me, "Where you and Vince went on a date."

Just like the characters in my previous novels, this time I'm not Audrey. However, something people don't always realize is the challenge of creating likable characters. For me at least this is a challenge because if I don't like the characters I'm less likely to be engaged to finish writing the novel. This is also true of me for watching movies and particularly television. I will stop watching certain shows if I don't like the characters.

And in my writing it's happened twice in the past two years: I have two manuscripts– one that needs to be almost completely revised and a second one that isn't finished– where I ended up not liking the man I created and I lost interest. 

When I'm creating characters, I not only need to think of a man I would like to have in my life, when I'm surrounding the main character with her (because I've only written from a female perspective so far) friends and family, I think of people I'd like to have at my dinner table. Now there might be people I don't really like but I try to keep them out of her orbit at least enough that they don't affect my interest in writing the story.

A good example of this is Audrey's ex-husband. I had to make sure he was someone I didn't like but he also didn't play into the story much except as part of her past. The tricky part of this is that sometimes there have to be antagonists who are human (rather than the main character battling herself or something about her life). But even trickier is making the antagonists work that they don't make the main character come off someone others would think is stupid as in, "Why would she waste her time with him?"

None of my characters are perfect but I want them to be finding strength in their lives rather than escorting everyone out the door before dinner has even started.