I am half-way through another book where characters are one-dimensionally good or evil.

Over dinner with Calder—my writing partner—I spent half the night talking about it.  I think I was just disappointed with the way the characters were turning out.  (I know, I need a life.)

Calder, who’d already read the story, said, “It was a first book.  Besides, how can we talk?  Look at Potion. You can’t get anyone more pure good than Alun, can you?”

She stopped me cold.  There is a special place on our bookshelf for first books.  They’re what we call ‘dream books’.  They’re usually first novels.

When you look back on an established author’s writing, you can often pick their first book just by the content and style, long before you look at dates and publication history. They’re fairy tales, pure and simple. Anne McCaffrey’s Restoree is a good example.

Good things happen to the people, seldom bad. And the characters are often nauseatingly perfect. If they’re good at something, they’re really good.

Now, to Potion.

Potion is a classic fantasy journey story. An enchanter and a fighter take work as bodyguards for for a man—Alun— who travels to a hostile land to rescue his aunt. In our story, Alun is pretty good. The fairest of the fair folk, the best enchanter—you name it, he’s got it, ad-nauseum. He is not the protagonist, but the whole book revolves around him.  He’s the catalyst for everything that happens, and continues to be the catalyst for change throughout the book.

Our protagonists—the two bodyguards—are no slouches either.  One is a powerful enchanter in her own right (not the most powerful, of course, because that is Alun), the other is a legendary swordsman who was coaxed out of retirement for the job.

Alun is so pure he’s almost a caricature. 

We know that. We believe that because he’s not the protagonist we can get away with it.

But Tegan and Blade are no slouches either. And this is where the problem lies. 

They’re downright good at what they do—magicking and fighting—not to mention they’re ‘good’ people too.  They don’t do ‘bad’ things.

So here am I, complaining about a set of characters being one-dimensional, when my own appear to be exactly the same.

I was channel surfing last night when I chanced on Will Ferrell in Stranger than Fiction.

This is a movie about a man who starts hearing a woman’s voice inside his head. This woman appears to be his author, and he is the character in a novel she is writing. (I haven’t watched it. I must do after this.)

In the scene I stopped at, Ferrell—a tax collector—is talking to a woman (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who has paid only part of her tax bill. There is no sexual tension between the two at all, but suddenly the author’s voice comes in over the top and talks about how Ferrell’s character couldn’t help noticing what attractive legs the woman has, and the way her body fits snugly into her skirt—or thoughts similar to that.

Because I was channel surfing and hadn’t expected the voice, it came totally out of the blue.

I had to laugh because I have read a lot of books where the physical attraction between protagonists is just like that.

I’m not talking about those stories which build up to events which culminate in a sudden physical attraction between two characters. When that’s well done it works, and it’s good.

Nor am I talking about relationships where the protagonists have been friends for a long time and then something happens that triggers an awareness of each other in a sexual way.

And of course, I’m not talking about the story where the attraction starts when the characters meet, and just keeps growing in looks and actions all the way through.

What I am talking about are those books where the characters are getting along just fine, without a hint of attraction between them and then, for no logical reason whatsover related to the story, they start thinking about each other sexually. It feels like the author has decided—all of a sudden—that they must be lovers. Almost as if the author is stuck for ideas, or doesn’t really know their characters. Or they need to change the direction of the story.

So, out of the blue, both characters start noticing things about each other that they hitherto hadn’t.

And it feels like an act of God. One minute the characters are friends or acquaintances, the next—by authorial decree—they’re embarking on an affair.