How do you write characters who are difficult to like? Bestselling author Alka Joshi looks at the good, the bad and the ugly, and explains why novels need all three
I was a shy child. When everyone else was participating, playing, dancing, I was observing. I watched our American neighbour taste my mother’s curry for the first time and say she liked it, all the while frowning with her eyes and her mouth. I watched my father’s colleague slap him on the back, congratulate Dad for having published his research paper, but then say maybe next time it would be in a better publication.
The difference between what people did and said fascinated me. I tucked away in my memory bank what their bodies communicated and what their actions didn’t. People are complex and contradictory, and I couldn’t get enough of them. So when I started writing fiction in my 50s it wasn’t a surprise that I populated my stories with characters who were complex and contradictory. In each of my novels, protagonists, antagonists and the supporting cast are good, bad and ugly. They are generous and selfish. They are proud and humble. They are defiant and submissive. They are like the people I enjoyed – and still enjoy – observing.
In The Henna Artist, Lakshmi is good, kind, helpful, but readers point out that she’s also manipulative, teasing favours from her clients without their knowledge, especially when it serves her larger goal of owning a house. Is there a reason she can’t be good and serve her own self-interest? There’s vulnerability in the grey area, which is why readers love her and root for her. If she was always, continuously, good, readers wouldn’t have trusted her. Have we ever known a sweet person who didn’t crave the unconditional acceptance of everyone around her? Perhaps she fears that without that ‘sweet’ identity, they would cease to love her?
You can answer those questions about each of your characters by creating a character bible. You’ll be amazed how much you’ll discover about a person you created from your imagination!
People have multiple dimensions. They shape-shift, like chameleons, depending on who they’re with. In The Secret Keeper of Jaipur, readers expect 20-year-old Malik to maintain the loyal, steadfast persona he displayed at the age of eight. And he doesn’t disappoint – until he’s confronted with temptation. A woman who wouldn’t have anything to do with him when she was fifteen is trying to seduce him now that they’re both adults. Readers are on edge: will he succumb?
That’s the thing about creating complex characters. They keep readers guessing, never able
