Concluding (I think) my blog posts reflecting on my recently completed Auckland Allies series (see earlier entries here and here), I want to discuss something I learned about writing characters who aren’t my usual.

I don’t know why a portion of my brain is dedicated to emulating a competent, capable, pragmatic mid-twenties woman, but those are the protagonists I tend to default to writing (despite being a man in my mid-fifties). They’re also the protagonists I most enjoy reading about, by no coincidence. Still, if you can only write one way, it’s probably time to do a writing exercise, unless you’re selling a ton of books by writing that one way. Maybe even then.

I didn’t straight-up set out to do a writing exercise when I introduced some non-typical (for me) characters into Auckland Allies, though. They just kind of turned up, and then I asked myself a key question about them, which made all the difference: What if I respected this character?

I’m thinking specifically of two characters: Kat, the middle-aged owner of the New Age shop, and Chelsea, the non-genre-savvy young woman (mid-twenties, yes) who finds herself in an urban fantasy she is poorly equipped to navigate when she’s bitten by a werewolf.

Kat has been around since the first book. I believe she’s in the first chapter, though without a speaking part at that point. The New Age shop she owns has offices over it, which two of the characters rent from her. It’s based on an organic shop in the suburb of Grey Lynn where I sublet offices briefly when I practiced hypnotherapy; there was a group of natural-health practitioners who worked out of the space above the shop. Initially, Kat was a bit of a caricature, or rather a highly recognisable type if you’ve spent much time around New Agey people. Somewhat vague, relentlessly positive, always speaking in a specific jargon that reinforces her own view of the world and excludes any other, and (as one of the characters puts it) capable of believing anything, as long as there’s no evidence.

In the final book, though, Kat – or rather, the way the characters see Kat – undergoes a transformation. Avoiding spoilers: she stands up to someone, in her own calm, sweet way, but firmly defining her boundaries, and it also becomes clear that her many years of New Age practice were developing something powerful in her all along.

Chelsea appears, unnamed and with no lines, in the fourth book, and in the fifth and final book becomes an initially unlikely addition to the cast. Her parents are doctors, they live in Remuera (one of Auckland’s more expensive suburbs, which has a lot of doctors in it), she went to a private school, and she works in nearby Newmarket, where she sells clothes to other “Remuera girls” (her words). She reads little beyond magazines, preferring to spend her leisure time watching the kind of reality shows that are optimized for interpersonal drama; she has never watched even the most popular science fiction and fantasy franchises (LOTR, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, the Marvel movies, Star Trek, Star Wars). Tara, always ready with the snark, observes that she spends too much time on hair, clothes, and makeup to try to distract attention from the fact that she has an ordinary face. She isn’t particularly quick on the uptake, either.

It would be all too easy to drop in a character like Chelsea and make her the butt of jokes, or dismiss her as superficial and worthless. Instead, I wondered: what if I respected her? And what if a couple of my characters – the brilliant Lynn and the uber-geeky Mark – respected her too, against the odds?

Well, as it turns out, what happens is that Chelsea turns out to be brave, good-hearted, loyal, and emotionally intelligent, and discovers that her lifelong goal of fitting in somewhere may be fulfilled by a highly unlikely crew of people with whom you’d think she had nothing in common. Because characters have layers.

I enjoy putting a bit of comedy into my writing, so I’ve made a bit of a project lately of reading “classic” comic novels. A lot of them show us shallow, self-important people with small lives and invite us to laugh at them. But one of my great role models for comic writing (and writing in general), Terry Pratchett, didn’t do that, at least not after his early books. He showed us people with small lives who longed for them to be larger, and who we loved watching as they fought and struggled and often pratfell their way towards that goal, and the goal of making the world a better place for everyone.

“Diversity” has become trendy in SFF lately, to the point that more than a few books seem to be giving lip service to it by throwing in a few protagonists who aren’t the old default (white, straight, male) and then carrying on to tell the same story they would have told in any case. Which is one way to assert that “normal” and “unremarkable” include a lot more identities than they used to, for sure. But in a world where Twitter and Facebook try to sort us into islands for the convenience of their advertisers, and then encourage us to fight with the people on the other islands, what I think is that we need a few more books in which we see characters who are not like us – the authors or the readers – in many different ways. Not just the usual identity labels, but other ways too. Characters who we nevertheless begin by treating with respect, and see where that gets us.

I think it will get us to some interesting and worthwhile places.