After a day off, I”m back in the saddle.  I can’t believe I’m already at question twenty.

20. What are your favorite character interactions to write?

I like a good fight.  Naw, not a Fight Club fight but a war of words.  Verbal brawls are hands down my favorites, somewhat ironic since I write mostly romance.  Not so ironic is the fights are between people who care about each other but have communication issues.  Their arguments pierce the rigid curtain of self-control and reveal thoughts and feelings that they’d previously suppressed.  Usually they are cathartic but sometimes they only further drive in the wedge.

My entire 2009 NaNo novel, All’s Fair in Love and War, dealt with a prickly and tentative relationship between the two main characters with plenty o’ sparring.  That was my first NaNo and I wisely chose something I knew I’d be able to come back to again and again over a very short time period.  My strategy worked because I finished it on 11/17 and it’s chock full of verbal zingers.

 Maybe it’s a passive aggressive way of venting frustrations–having your characters do it for you, like puppet therapy. (Actually I just really like the word “puppet” and try to use it as often as possible, even threatening to send my kids to puppet camp, a source of endless conflict and debate.)  Even when the characters are seemingly getting along, I try to have an undercurrent of conflict, if only to bolster the chemistry.  Here’s a progression of conflicts between the two main characters in All’s Fair, Colin and Shelby.

Escalating conflict:

“You’re a tease and a collector,” he said with a smug expression that she’d have given her right arm to have been able to slap off.

“And you’re a jerk who thinks he can pigeon-hole all women into a few limited categories.  Let’s see if I can get them all.  It shouldn’t be too hard considering your stunted emotional outlook.  You’ve got your group one–mothers, daughters and sisters; group two–the marriageable, subservient virgins; group three–the playthings who are whores the instant the bed grows cold, and then there is the category the rest of us occupy–bitches who refuse to go willingly into either of categories two or three.  Did I get them all?”

“Well you got the bitch part right,” he muttered as he moved closer.

Détente in the making:

After she sang her verse, she sipped then said, “I’m tone deaf and can’t sing a note.”

“Worst kept secret ever,” he said dryly.  He drank, sang his verse then shared his guilty secret. “My first girlfriend dumped me for the President of the local Michael Jackson fan club.”

“I dumped my first boyfriend for the captain of the debate team.  He dumped me a week later because he said I argued too much.”

“Imagine that.”

“Shut up, Colin.”

But détente is blasted to smithereens in the face of the mother of all blowouts:

She assumed a stance sideways to him and spat out over her shoulder, “You just shut up, Colin Montoya.  Shut your big fat mouth and stay out of other people’s business,” then kicked herself for sounding like a first grader in the schoolyard.  She watched him approach but held her ground.  He didn’t stop until she could feel his breath on the back of her neck. 

“Or what?  You’re like a snarling little kitten, you know that?  All I have to do is pick you up by the scruff of your neck, and you’ll dangle helplessly under my control.” 

If he thought making an oblique reference to the night they spent together was evidence of his power over her, he was sadly mistaken.  “Get away from me, Colin.  Why don’t you run along now and find your date.  I’m sure she, for one, misses your company.”  She turned the rest of the way around to leave, her back now to him and managed to put a few feet between them before she heard him speak again.

“Where’s your date?  Alex?  Or was it Russ?  Or Gavin?  Whatever his name was, where is he?  I get so confused by all your men.  I’ll have to remember to take a number the next time I’m feeling… masochistic.”

Okay, so enough with the quotes already, sorry, but I do love a good fight.

 

Image by * Dino Galvagno * via Flickr

 

Moving on to minor characters now, who often can be more fun and interesting to write than the protagonist and antagonist.

19. Favorite minor that decided to shove himself into the spotlight and why!

Few people have met her, but the one who made me giggle the most was Elise from The Fool’s Bet.  Though the rest of the story was a monument to Freshman mistakes, she had quite a few lines either about her or that she spoke that I still think are pretty damn funny.  Here’s how she’s described when the reader first meets her (please forgive the bad writing in all the excerpts below that I see so much more clearly now):

Elise was recently divorced from husband number two. She had lived in LA a bit too long, unfortunately, and men to her were becoming like bottled water–absolutely essential for living but quickly consumed and 100% disposable.

When Elise meets her dear friend’s very tall love interest for the first time:

As he made his way toward them, Elise said, “Good Lord, Chelsea.  What have you dragged home?  He’s very cute but couldn’t you find one in your size?  You won’t be able to kiss and f**k him at the same time!”

A good friend to the protagonist, Elise was great with a comeback that was both funny and supportive:

“Has she always been like this?” Zach asked Elise, nodding his head toward Chelsea.

“Do you mean sarcastic, bossy and sharp-tongued?  Or do you mean witty, intelligent, and generous?  If so, the answer is yes, she’s always been like this.”

And then one of my favorite exchanges between Elise and Chelsea:

“Define what you believe to be the perfect guy for me?” asked Chelsea.

“Driven but kind, successful but not flaunting of it, attractive but not so attractive that women would be throwing themselves at him, private, generous and with a sense of humor.  How’d I do?”

“That’s pretty good but I doubt such a man exists.”

“Oh he exists all right and you’re going to go out with him and have a marvelous time.  The man I’m thinking of is single and in possession of a fortune.  Ergo, he must surely be in want of a wife…or at least someone to act like a wife in all things carnal.”

“What’s his name, Charles Bingley?” asked Chelsea, laughing at Elise’s literary allusion to her favorite novel, Pride and Prejudice.

“I think he goes by Chuck these days,” said Elise.  “But we really must fix you up a bit, maybe get your hair trimmed and re-layered and dye it to cover the grey.”

“I don’t have any grey hairs yet!”

“Just a few.  Nothing a semi-permanent rinse can’t cover up though.  I can do your makeup for you too.  You’ll go, have a nice dinner and then you can thank him in your own special way afterwards.”

“Elise!  I hope you are not implying that I should have sex with this guy just because he buys me dinner,” said Chelsea, though not overly shocked, considering the source.

“Certainly not.  You should have sex with him because you need to have sex with someone and soon before you forget how.  But he doesn’t need to know that.  Make him chase you around Netherfield Park a bit first.”

I still snicker at that last line.  Ha!  Sometimes it’s hard to be humble; other times you gotta batten down the hatches against the fury of bluntly honest feedback.  The Fool’s Bet‘s harshest critic (to whom I am eternally grateful for her candor but still limping from her sarcastic delivery of it)  had the kindest words for Elise.

Though I trunked  The Fool’s Bet, I may recycle Elise one of these days, possibly even give her her own story.  Her will to live is quite strong.  She just had the misfortune to befriend a character who wasn’t all that interesting.  And as they say, timing is everything!