Character Building.

For many authors, one of the hardest things to do is build convincing characters. In the world of commercial thriller fiction, where by default a novelist is asked to take the reader out of the ordinary world, it can be extremely tough to create characters that can be both believable and inspiring at the same time. Make your character too tough or invincible, and many readers will complain that they're not believable; make them too vulnerable, and you're stepping out of your genre altogether.

It's a tough call to make, to find a narrow spectrum of attributes that enables your hero to be tenacious, resilient and resourceful without becoming so unassailable as to insult the reader's intelligence. The simple fact is that no one author is ever going to please all of their readers all of the time: my own debut novel, Covenant, has a review on one website that lovingly praises the realism and well developed character of Ethan Warner, my main protagonist, whilst right next to it sits another review complaining of a lack of character development for.... Ethan Warner.

I've been thinking a lot about character building as a result of these apparently contradictory opinions. It's easy to put it down to the readers' differing personal tastes, but I've come to the conclusion that something must be wrong to provoke any such wildly differing opinions on any one piece of work, and in my case at least I think it boils down not to a novel's characters themselves but how those characters fit the novel in question.

I've been watching a lot of TV dramas lately, those with two main protagonists. Shows like Rizzoli and Isles ( adapted from Tess Gerritson's novels ) really show how it should be done: both the leads are experts, but in totally different fields. Both are unrealistically talented, yet it doesn't matter because their skills perfectly fit the world they inhabit and their attitudes, friendship and banter keep the viewer coming back for more. Another hit show currently running, The Walking Dead, does much the same thing but within a more serious world of survival and hardship. What these shows have in common is that the characters, friend or foe, are in constant conflict with each other, and conflict is what makes thriller fiction tick. But it's not the conflict of 1940's movies, with a moustachioed mastermind villain and the upstanding British agent in pursuit - it's real, day to day conflict of character that we all know ourselves from school or work or whatever, amplified to cater to the audience demand for something out of the ordinary, to be entertained by characters facing things that, most likely, we will never have to face.

Commercial fiction works much like these kind of shows, with characters placed in high-risk situations or careers whom we then follow. While keeping a viewer entertained for an hour is perhaps a bit easier than keeping a reader hooked for 400 or more pages, the same rules apply. If your lead character's nature perfectly complements the world they inhabit, then everything else will become more believable to the reader. Heroic or cowardly, humurous or droll, strong or weak or troubled or upbeat, the character must fit their world perfectly or somebody, somewhere, will find fault. The less that do, the more likely your next work will find success in a tough marketplace.

The Re-draft.

I've been hard at work since my meeting with Luigi at LBA, trying to make sure that I have a completed manuscript ready by September 2010. Fortunately, despite the amount of work, I'm well on target.

Cutting a 150,000 word novel down to between 110 / 120,000 words is no mean feat in itself, but it's surprising how easy it becomes once you get stuck into it. In my particular case there is a change of story and plot-line to consider, which allows for judicious cutting and editing along the way, but none the less I'm already down to 130,000 words without having lost anything I need.

Harder to achieve is the tremendous amount of research that the story changes require. Years of studying certain aspects of scientific endeavour ( chiefly cosmology and Einstein's General Relativity ) have given way to rapidly gathering information on genetics, mtDNA, Biblical archaeology ( honest! ) and cellular biochemistry. It took me two years to understand relativity. I have two months to master my all of my new subject material, ensure that it's accurate, and incorporate it into the story.

But it's FUN! And that's in addition to Luigi's request for "more action". This has required me to subtly change my hero's motivation and character, giving him a more determined and driven edge to account for his willingness to go on the attack as well as use his wits to achieve his goals. I like my leading characters to be believable, not Uzi-weilding Terminators of the ( yawn ) ex-SAS type, so his actions must be justifiable in the eyes of the reader. To me it's always a disappointment to read about a hero with his back to the wall facing three adversaries, wondering how he's going to get out of the situation, only for him to drop them all using some bloody Vulcan death-grip or something and walk away unscathed, all square-jawed and invincible.

For once, editing and redrafting is a joy, and it's great to see the novel taking its new shape. The pace of the story is almost doubled by removing the things that Luigi felt were unnescessary, and I still have 6-8 weeks to complete the work and polish it before sending it back to Luigi. Onward and upward!