Day Five {Least Favorite}

day five: the least favorite character you've written

(This is a bit like the Razzie Award, isn't it? I don't know that I would want the distinction of Worst Character.)

When on day one I struggled to produce a favorite character, I was looking over a cast of characters whom I dearly love and trying to pick out one - at most two - who I could tentatively call my "favorite." Like most writers, I even take pleasure in my villains. Christopher of The Soldier's Cross was indeed less fun to write than Jamie of Wordcrafter or Lewis of The White Sail's Shaking, but still I know him and he belongs to me, so I can be pleased with him. No, none of my villains can step in to fill this role.

I have had difficult characters in all my works so far, with the possible exception of Wordcrafter. In fact, I've discovered that I have the most trouble with female characters. Jamie and Copper, the two women of Wordcrafter, came with surprising ease to me, however, and so I would have to turn to either Fiona (The Soldier's Cross) or Marta Rais (The White Sail's Shaking). But I don't even remember writing Fiona (ah, the bliss of forgetfulness), so I would have to say that currently my least favorite character is

Marta Rais

Marta is the other main character of White Sail's. The daughter of a Syracusan actress and a British seaman, Marta is orphaned at seventeen when her mother dies of an illness and her father is reportedly killed in an engagement with a French corvette. Her survival depends on either reaching England and, hopefully, her father's relatives, or remaining in Syracuse and going to work in a theatre. She refuses to do the latter and turns all her energies toward getting to Britain, but by a twist of Providence she finds herself on an American schooner heading to a war with the Barbary states instead of a British merchant bound for England.

Marta is a hard character to write because she is a woman in a man's world, which means I have to show her vulnerability while still trying to convey her strength of character. I had the same trouble with Fiona. Women weren't meant to be running here and there without anyone to protect them, and so it is difficult to feel and write the emotions of a girl who finds herself in a situation such as this. She can't be crying all the time (Tip would go crazy, poor fellow) but neither can I pretend that she would be as cool and collected as a man when she has just been dumped into a world entirely foreign to her. There has to be a balance, and it's a difficult one to find.

Although I am 90,000 words into my novel, most of the sections that are to be from Marta's perspective have yet to be written because she is still largely an unknown. I suspect, however, that by the time I reach the final page of White Sail's I will be as fond of Marta as of the other characters, and once again I'll have no reply when someone asks me who my least favorite character is. Which is fine with me.