A while back I mentioned to my boyfriend that I was deeply disappointed in one of my characters. He was a bit quirky, heart in the right place, dedicated, a little rough around the edges and set up to be the good guy. The guy who is doing everything for the right reasons, the guy you can trust. Except for one thing, he's a terrible terrible boyfriend. His relationship history is littered with broken hearts.
Inevitably this led to the discussion of imaginary or real ... can I really tell the difference. Well of course I can. Radleigh (my disappointing good guy) isn't real, I know that but my disappointment was. Even if I made him up and should therefore really know everything about him.
For some reason it doesn't always work that way. When creating a story I have a pretty good idea of exactly what the main characters are like, because I've spent a lot of time working on them and getting to understand how they can best tell the story. In a sense I've come to know them over a period of months. A lot of my secondary characters are a bit more roughly sketched and that's fine, I don't need to know as much about them because they are there to support the main cast not outshine them.
Radleigh was a secondary character with a fairly straightforward small part. He wasn't supposed to be a big character, he was supposed to show up the villains flaws and he was supposed to create a counterpoint to my protagonist (who's a bit tortured).
However, I took a writing class and we were asked to take a look at a character, write up a character sheet and write a letter from their point of view. So to start with a fresh character I thought it wouldn't harm to use Radleigh. This is where I started to look at the likely motivations for why Radleigh wants to be the good guy so badly, why is he so dedicated and why does he ride a scooter*? What sorts of flaws does he have, what's his Achilles heel and what makes him sad? In short the sort of questions that I know for my main characters, because I will need to use all of this information.
Knowing all these things for a secondary character just makes me want to write him a story and inevitably he's muscled his way into the plot, which leaves a bit of a problem. He doesn't really fit in, I already know that many of the scenes are going to go and that makes me sort of sad, because despite his problems I like Radleigh and I'm not sure I'm going to be ready to let him go so quickly.
The solution is not to rewrite the original story but to write a sequel with Radleigh ... yes, because I need more writing projects.
*He rides a scooter because he lives in London and there's the congestion charge to think of and he's a copper so he's got a car for work and well I liked the idea of an ex rugby playing bloke on a little blue scooter.
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