Winter 2025 newsletter

I’ve been thinking about fear quite a bit lately.

The role of fear in real life. The role of fear in fiction.

In early February I attended a wonderful writers’ retreat. One of the workshops, led by the successful romance writer Annabel Monaghan, focussed on creating memorable characters in fiction.

Her advice (paraphrased) was: give your characters an emotional wound - one that guides and misguides their actions and reactions. All your characters, she counselled, need a wound. Even your villains.

Huh.

Instinctively, I’d given my protagonist and my main secondary characters wounds. But my antagonist? I’d long felt she was a bit 2D, yet I wasn’t sure how to fix that.

Full disclosure: my experience as a journalist gives me an advantage when it comes to creating engaging fictional characters. Over the years, I interviewed thousands of people. I have a virtual catalogue in my head containing various personality types to select from, with one important exception: I never interviewed any truly evil people. I mean, I interviewed people who caused harm; who made some pretty bad mistakes; I even interviewed Canada’s only convicted ecoterrorist. When I think about these people, I’d say their moral compass didn’t align with mine, but they had a moral compass. They weren’t depraved. They didn’t willfully promote hate and lies. They didn’t seek to become wealthy at any cost. They didn’t covet and pursue absolute power. In short, they weren’t villains.

So, without personal experience of someone like this, I had to really think about how to give my antagonist a wound. Annabel Monaghan says, ‘the why’ is the wound. And I’ve concluded, for my antagonist in any event, ‘the why’ comes down to fear.

Why would she be willing to instill fear in others to get what she wants?

Of course, making changes to my antagonist had a domino effect on the other characters in How the Invisible Woman Learned to Fly.

A corollary question I needed to answer: How do they react to the fear she instills in them?

Sadly, there is no shortage of non-fiction examples out there. Many - too many - real-life villains for me to observe (these people aren’t exactly wallflowers) and mooch personality traits off of. And many - too many - people who are afraid of them.

Watching people react to fear is an interesting exercise. Some cower or hide behind their posh accents and fancy titles. Others traduce. Still others grovel and toady. Some people even turn into apologists.

Yet many also feel the fear and react courageously. (See my autumn 2024 blog.)

It takes my protagonist Marcie Blanchard some time to act courageously. She prevaricates. Procrastinates. Tells herself she can’t won’t shouldn’t. But finally, Marcie does the bravest thing possible.

In the end, her bravery doesn’t result in accolades, or headlines, or a windfall of money. It’s quiet heroism. But Marcie’s actions do make a difference in a few people’s lives, and that’s what counts, doesn’t it?

These are difficult, dark times. Bravery can take many forms: it could be standing up for an entire country; or it could be making one person’s day better.

Never forget, you can choose how you react to fear. Don’t be afraid to be brave.