This month is another busy one with lots going on, including several appearances. I am teaching a workshop on paths to publishing on June 14th at Tempe Library, and on June 21st, I will be participating in the Mesa Library Local Authors event.

This past Saturday was Books & BBQ at the fabulous Bookmaze Indie Book and Gaming store. Authors and readers gathered together, dined on delicious food (and cookies!) and hung out, networking, talking about books—writing them and reading them—and sharing in community. So many people making connections. It was awesome.

In chatting with other authors about our books and characters, I got to thinking about relationships and motivation, and all the things that make us—and our characters—human and real. The multifaceted emotions and behaviors that make us such complex beings and our need for connection—even those of us on the introverted side—are aspects of character that need to be portrayed (shown) in their actions, words, and deeds to make them real for the reader. We humanize characters through connection, through the things they are drwawn to. Even our antagonists.

When portraying these traits and aspects of behavior, the author treads a fine line between subtlety and heavy-handedness to ensure the reader understands the character without feeling they’re being bludgeoned with information. This is especially true when using character tropes, such as the dark lord, the evil queen, or the brave knight. That is, unless you’re pushing against standard use, such as the portrayal of Alyce, the dark grace in Malice by Heather Walter, or Gregory Maguire’s portrayal of the Wicked Witch of the West in Wicked.

What makes Maguire’s retelling of the Wizard of Oz so engaging is the humanizing of the Wicked Witch of the West and the revelation that the good Wizard of Oz was not as good as we thought. To do this, Maguire had to provide believable motivation and human emotions to drive the characters to behave in the ways they do. The success of this story and its subsequent adaptation for theater are a testament to Maguire’s ability to see into the human heart and show us the ways in which our most sacred ideals can be twisted by outside influences.

With Malice, we get an entirely new version of the Sleeping Beauty story, beginning with the Graces, who, unlike the original seven fairies, are specialized magic users, and must toil and compete to win royal and moneyed patrons. Alyce is a rare dark Grace and is ostracized for the power she holds in spells of unmaking rather than making. In some ways, Alyce is a typical young person, wishing for connection and even falling in love, but Alyce is also a deeply complex, multi-faceted character, who is especially engaging because of her deep flaws and imperfect humanness, despite being a creature of magic.

One of my first experiences of a writer successfully humanizing a familiar antagonist and writing a believable story in which that antagonist becomes protagonist through humanization was John Gardner’s Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf epic from the monster’s point of view. In this story, we come to understand and empathize with Grendel, because his motivations are understandable. He is not only consistent and true to his nature, but he is also hell-bent on seeking revenge for an attack on his mother, his deep anger for this evil something to which we can certainly relate.

Relationships are a key component of being human, whether the relationship is between a boy and his dog, someone seeking to make a connection, a person and the focus of their deep desire and love, or that of a monster and his mother. Relationships, or the longing for one, are often what motivates us to behave in the ways that we do (well, that and cookies!), and those of our characters need to be believable for our readers to relate and engage with them.

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