I do not understand it, but I do worry it makes me a worse writer.
For this isnāt solely fanfiction, thereās always been (and I think it rises) pressure for characters to be relatable, to be insertable spaces for readers. People love this. They plainly do!
Will you write about relatable characters. Will you not have them do that because people wonāt like them. Can people relate to that. Is (character) relatable?
And as a reader I genuinely donāt care, as itās entertainment, so my main criteria is that characters are interesting. Do they make me curious and make me laugh, okay, we are in (show) business. I do not want to be in there. There be literally dragons in there. I do not want to be with Mr Darcy. I want Elizabeth Bennet to be with Mr Darcy.
But as a writer, it worries me that thereās this big readerly desire I donāt entirely understand. Tumblr tags full of ācharacter x readerā fics. Rising requirement for the relatable in popular media. Other peopleās pleasure is my business. (I may sound like a words hooker here. No matter.) Nobodyās wrong to like the flavours of entertainment they like. I just want to understand better.
So that was another reason I wrote Rae and Eric in Long Live Evil - characters who would jump at going into a story, and have āme x favourite characterā daydreams. Letās engage with what makes this appealing and what makes it complicated.
Mind you, I donāt know if I did it right. I donāt know if Rae and Eric themselves are relatable. They are both very idiosyncratic. I do also often think itās insulting to readers to act as if they relate to fairly blank slates. But what do they relate to? Itās worth asking the question. Is it love for a character? Is it a wish for comfort or romance or adventure? If I can understand the motive maybe I can understand the desire.
I was recently on a writing retreat with lovely writer friends (huge for me, havenāt gone on a big trip with a big group in years because, wellā¦ a (totally different) writer friend group fractured after I got cancer) and had such a great and interesting time. But we did have many discussions about relating to protagonists, which ones we related to and why, and how I canāt āgo in.ā One male writer friend talked about how he is one of his protagonists, and nobody guesses this because sheās a girl. It was fascinating. I reached few conclusions. But talking about writing, like writing, is more about asking interesting questions.
I was at a festival last year and two extremely lovely readers came to me and said they loved Long Live Evil (yay hurray!) and they went to the panel going āI wonder what the Long Live Evil writer looks like, will we know which one she is right awayā and then said they knew it was me as soon as they saw me. Which was a lovely thing to say and I was very flattered. But I did wonder if it was about me seeming like Rae, or like the kind of person who would write Long Live Evil. Either way, itās lovely - if itās the second, I am that person, and if itās the first, maybe I did move closer to the readers and writers I wanted to understand by writing it.
(A picture taken of me that day. Maybe it was just about the evil glint ever present in my eyes.)
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