Mandy Botlik asked Zoë Marriott:

How do you go about writing characters that are strong and also damaged, like frost and Suzume?

Zoë Marriott Excellent question! I think the key is to see characters as whole people, just like yourself and the other people in your life.

We all - everyone of us, even the ones that seem totally perfect, confident and together on the surface - have damage of our own that makes us feel weak and flawed and hurt somewhere deep inside. But we all also have strengths and wonderful, powerful, worthwhile things about us, too. Vulnerable and strong may seem to be opposites, but actually it's the way they exist together within someone's personality that makes them who they are. Characters have to be the same. That often means reaching down into yourself as a writer and putting some analogue of your own pain and weakness on the page, and it's difficult - writing about Suzume was especially hard for me - but ultimately really rewarding because you feel as if you've reflected reality and created something really truthful in your fiction.

The good thing about writing YA is that often you're able to show a young person just beginning to grow all their strengths and their passions around the places inside them that are vulnerable and flawed, learning how to be who they need to be to survive and thrive. Sometimes you see this right from the start, as with Suzume and the events at the beginning of Shadows on the Moon, which she spends the whole book learning cope with. Sometimes, as with Frost in FrostFire, you portray a person desperately struggling and then go back and show the reader what has left them this way before you begin to build them back up again.

Tl;dr: strong and damaged are two sides of the same coin, and every character should have some of each inside them.

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