Characters without character flaws and scars tend to be boring — the Mary Sues of literature, there not to drive the action but to be acted upon. I try not to write them, but that means I do spend a lot of time thinking about the emotional and psychological wounds that make my characters more than two-dimensional.
In this week’s WIP Wednesday, I’m inviting you to post excerpts from your current work-in-progress that talk about a character’s wounds: physical, emotional, psychological or spiritual; obvious or hidden.
My piece is from The Beast Next Door, my novella for the Bluestocking Belles’ Valentine box set. My hero bears both internal and internal scars.
How beautiful she had grown. The men of Bath must all be married or blind. Her wide blue eyes narrowed, and then she smiled and held her hands up as if she would fetch him down through the window.“Eric? Eric, is it really you?”
Ugo gave an amiable bark and wagged his tail, then collapsed onto the grass at Charis’s feet. She frowned again,looking from the dog to its master. “He is yours? Oh, but he has been here for weeks. Eric, have you been hiding from me?”
“I did not want to scare you, Charis. I never thought you would know me right away. But wait, I will come down.” No flinch. No fixing her eyes and then turning them away. It was as if the disfigured side of his face was no different than the side that bore a single long scar from a knife cut.
“Of course, I knew you,” she greeted him when he rounded the folly and approached the bench. “No one has eyes like yours, Eric. And no one calls me Charis except you. Here!” She backed to sit again on the bench, sweeping her gown to one side and patting the place beside her. “Come and sit with me and tell me everything you’ve done since last we could write. Oh, Eric, when Nanny died, I felt as if I had lost you both, and I can only imagine how you must have felt so far away from home! I am so sorry.”
Eric hesitated. Given a choice, he’d have sat on the other side, so she didn’t have to look at the mess the surgeons had made. Charis put her head to one side, her smile slipping a little, and he sat quickly before he made her uncertain of her welcome.
“I thought it was worse for you,” he told her, “stuck here and no one knowing or caring how important she was to us both.”
Well, you reminded me of Dangerous Works—his external scars and her internals ones.
There were twenty people on Georgiana’s staff, and not one of them so much as looked her in the eye, much less engaged in conversation. To expect more was ludicrous. Differences of class aside, not one person had taken any interest in her study of Greek in the eleven long years since Andrew left.
Andrew cared, at least he did once. She squeezed her eyes shut. Andrew again. The man’s horridly scarred face—and the untouched face of the long-gone schoolboy—haunted her, had done so since she saw him at Groghan’s store. Thoughts of that face left her unable to get any work done.
She replaced her cup in its saucer with a slap. The clang of crockery made Eunice jump. Everything made Eunice jump.
“Stay put, Eunice. I’m just gathering my references.”
Georgiana rose on a swish of silk skirts, tossed the cup and saucer onto the tray, and pulled Liddell’s Lexicon and a handful of others off the shelf. She spread them on the desk and began to flip absently through them, checking various words. “Nymph” was clear and consistent. “Anigrus” didn’t appear and was likely a proper noun in any case, but she wondered what or who it was. Any man with a half-decent education probably knew.
She resented her own ignorance. She didn’t know how the nymphs moved. Walk was the simplest translation, she suspected, but she wanted to know how they walked, what sort of movement the poetess was trying to depict. Lack of knowledge frustrated her.
She picked up a shabby little book from the scattered pile and ran a finger over it affectionately. Stewart’s Advanced Greek for Young Scholars, her oldest and dearest friend. She smiled at the odd conceit. Her oldest Greek reference perhaps, though she had few enough friends. She opened the cover. A neatly copied inscription covered the frontispiece.
To Lady Georgiana, with wishes for success.
Respectfully,
A. Mallet
She was seventeen when he found her lurking behind the palms in her father’s conservatory, contending with an abbreviated passage from Plato. Andrew acted as though it was perfectly normal for a girl two years his senior to struggle alone over material he had mastered many years before. Fear of discovery and her mother’s bile had made her very careful. Only Andrew knew, and he never revealed her secret to her parents. Two weeks after the encounter, an anonymous parcel arrived. I
L:ove, love, love this book