We’ve all witnessed the occasional, always distasteful experience of meeting a parent who clearly favors one of their children over another. And we wonder how that can be because a parent should love all of their kids equally, right?
You might have more in common with or get along better with one over another because different interests and personality clashes are common in all families. You’ll also always treat babies and toddlers differently than you do adolescents, teens, and adults. But to say you favor and/or love one more than the others? Real parents will never find themselves in that position. Ever.
To shift gears in an abrupt and startling manner…
Authors tend to feel the same way about the heroes and heroines in their books. Sure, there are characters – like Anna Thornton and Michael Weston (and for the record, I named my Michael Weston several years before Burn Notice premiered on USA) – that we’ll hate as much as readers do. But they’re just co-stars, necessary to a story but nowhere near as important as those like Dan and Jess or Cameron and Laura (referencing couples in the Coach’s Boys and Casteloria series’).
So when I heard an interviewer ask a guest author who his favorite characters were (in the stories he’d written), I wondered how he could choose. Much to my surprise though, he did.
Maybe it’s different for male authors? I don’t know. But for me to choose a favorite among my main characters – my heroes and heroines – it would be like trying to choose which of my kids I love the most … impossible.
Should I choose Dan, the patriarch among their tight knit group of friends? Or Sam, who is so sweet and brave? Then there’s Cal, always making sure everyone is fed no matter what’s going on. And lets not forget about Nolan and Fin and Cameron, and Chris, Jon, and Ed. What about Alec, Kyle, Jake, Tristan, Ian, Elliot, Daniel, Scott, and the rest? And those are just the guys from most of my books. Let’s not forget that for each one of them, there’s a female love interest.
My fictional sons and daughters. I created them, made them come alive. Therefore, I cannot choose.
The supporting cast is another story though. They’re like the classmates you went to school with. Wallflowers and jocks, divas and normal kids and bullies. Some are your friends. Some you wish were your friends. Some you hope will be abducted by aliens.
So ask me which minor character I like the least and I can rattle the name off without hesitation. Anna Thornton. I knew she’d be a rotten person from the start but had no idea I’d come to dislike her as much as I did.
And this, my friends, is how I feel about the characters who live in my books. They’re almost as real to me as living, breathing human beings. I’ll bet I’m not the only author who feels that way either.
That said, just because I can’t choose, it doesn’t mean I can’t ask you to choose. So I am. 😀
If you’ve read any of my books, do you have a favorite character?
