Development of Central characters: Where do they come from?
By Zoe Brooks
In order for me to really enjoy a book, I need to care for the central character. I like her to be flawed and human, and I want to come to an understanding of her during the course of the story. One other thing I need - she should have some guts. It's what I attempt to do in my own books. It seems from the reviews that I have succeeded. But where did my central character come from?
When I was a little girl I used to get a comic called Bimbo (it really was called that) and my favourite bit was a series called The Further Adventures of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Having read it I would run up and down the hall inventing the next installment and somehow my version was always better than that which the real writers came up with. Even then I liked my heroines strong and active.
My reading of Bimbo may have stopped, but my favourite character stayed with me as the centre of my daydreams. She came in all sorts of forms as I would have several stories going at any one time and her trials and tribulations evolved as I did. Looking back I now realise that I used her as a mechanism to explore the world and understand people I met in it. I still do.
