I guess you could say that no matter what the characters are enduring, I try to make them retain their humanity. Their self-absorbed, grouchy, selfish, aggravating humanity.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In order to inhabit a character, you've got to embrace and empathise with them.
The same characters that keep reappearing, bigger than life, find their own integrity in doing what they do the way they do it, even if it causes their own deaths.
As a writer, I have this compulsion to take characters who appear formidable and bombard them with adversity until they crumble. What's interesting is watching them rise again, and seeing how they've changed and grown, if indeed they have.
I think, above all, the characters in my novels feel universal to the readers.
I have, in some ways, saved characters that have been marginalized by society by playing them - and having them still have dignity and still survive, still get through it.
I've been trying to take this journey over the last four years of getting away from playing manipulative and villainous characters and playing characters that are affected by what happens to them as opposed to unaffected.
You decide which characters you want and then do the best you can to bring their humanity to the forefront in the context that you place them in - the crises in which you've placed them.
I try to give both my heroes and villains an emotional dimensionality which provides the motivation for their actions.
I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.
I'm attracted to polarizing characters who upend the civility of life.