No, I’m not talking about the missing brain cell….though I could post ad nauseum about that topic.
I’m talking about LOST, the television show. I’ve been watching faithfully since it began, and it’s got to be my favorite show on television right now.
Yes, the plot is fantastic and filled with twists and turns and secrets galore, but what really gets me about LOST is the characterization.
The good guys aren’t all good. The bad guys aren’t all bad. It’s a writer’s haven here. I learn something new each week about how to draw a human, three dimensional character. (Yes, sometimes I forget the basics of writing…oy!)
No one on that show is perfect. Kate, the beautiful lead, has a dark side. So does Jack, the savior doctor. Sawyer, the gorgeous bad boy, has a soft, wounded side. Every single time I start to hate someone for what they’ve done to someone else on that show, they reveal a facet to their personality that makes me take back every bad word I ever said about them and look at them in a new light.
Which brings me back to my current work in progress.
Sawyer is the bad guy that all us good girls love to love. I was having a problem with the hero in the book I’m writing, when it finally hit me today. I need to take my hero, who has a very painful past, and give him an edge. I have to make him just a little ‘bad’. I have to ….. *gasp*….make him be mean to the heroine.
That’s always so hard for me to do. I never want my characters to be mean. But if I don’t make them real, if I don’t give them flaws, they won’t be three dimensional. They’ll be caricatures of the perfect beautiful woman and the perfect, gorgeous man.
And let’s face it. Perfect is boring.
Off to replot my book and rewrite the first chapter.