Reading a chapter of Horrid Henry out loud this morning. As you do in holiday week. Part of the fun is what it tells us about our strengths and our limitations.
Perfect Peter is of course more goody goody than feasible, but in today’s chapter, he also seems to have an OCD thing happening with his soft toys. He KNOWS Henry has been in his room because one of his toy sheep is facing the wrong way. And is crooked. Oh the agony.
I know that the author wants us to realise that we are not as good – or as bad – as any of the characters. We all have strengths, and blind spots. So what might this mean for our own writing?
We want our characters to be real. To live, rather than just be ciphers. Because we need characters to relate to, to share our burdens, our sorrows, our joys, our embarrassing moments. Glimpses of enlightenment.
As I’ve been thinking about things emerging in writing, rather than being planned out, I’m reminded of how even established authors can get caught out by their characters. They expect the story to go one way but find that the character wants to go somewhere else. Behave in a different way.
I’m kind of hoping to find a character like that, one day. The sense of knowing they are whole, in some way. They are consistent, in and of themselves. They are there to point the way, when so often we don’t know where our path leads us.
There is something deeply comforting in the idea that, as they guide themselves home, we can, in some senses, follow on behind, and know we are where we should be.