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Melissa Crisp won the copy of An Appetite for Violets. Do miss the current giveaway of Authors In Bloom. Melissa Crisp won the copy of An Appetite for Violets. Do miss the current giveaway of Authors In Bloom. The Importance of Complex Characters By Jacqueline Friedland
Photo by Rebecca Weiss A couple of years ago, there was a debate in the literary world about “likeable” characters. The question, essentially, boiled down to this: must a character be unpleasant, whether angry or aggressive, selfish, or all gloom-and-doom in order to be taken seriously as a literary character? When the debate arose, the focus was primarily on female characters— if a female protagonist has too many redeemable qualities as a person, does this detract from her substance as a character in a story? This query nagged at me and took on a new shape during my writing Trouble the Water , as I watched my two main protagonists undergo journeys of personal growth that left them both decidedly more pleasant than the people they were when the story began. The question I needed to answer was whether depth and meaning are negated by personal recoveries? My own take, as a reader, is that if I am going to spend hours reading a novel, hanging out with cha...
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