“Jeez,” a new-to-me reader complained, “couldn’t you have skipped the main female character’s knee problem? I mean, great story but who cares about her bum knee?”
Of course, I checked the reader’s age next because this particular story was advertised as paranormal women’s fiction. It even, at the time, had Midlife in the title. Yep, in her twenties, bless her heart. She’d picked it up to learn more about some of the rituals I’d included in the first book in the Rites of Passage trilogy. Readers my age had praised the character’s “realistic” struggle with physical limitations, slow healing, and unexpected injuries.
If it’s realistic, there’s a reason for that. I sometimes give my characters the same physical limitations I have at the time of the writing. However, those limitations are directly related to the character and to the story. They serve several purposes.
For example, when I was early in the writing of The Book of Heroes, I broke a tooth. Voila! Professor Drusilla St. Augustine now has a toothache. How she responds to it and the availability of her dentist are subtle clues to changes in the timelines.
In Dark Revelations of Joan of Arc, Aubrey (before she changed her identity to Drusilla) was left with a knee injury after a physical altercation with an Interpol agent. That injury may or may not have been inspired by a fencing injury that left me unable to climb steps for several months—I’ll never tell!—but it was also integral to Aubrey’s ability to escape through the palazzo’s secret passages.
When I reinjured my knees while writing the book that I’ve recently rebranded from Midlife Illusions (retitled Rite of Awakening) to Rite of Awakening, the first in the Rites of Passage trilogy, my main character had the misfortune of dealing with the same injury in her early forties, which made that young reader balk. If you’re used to magically or technologically enhanced superheroes (I have a few of those, too), my characters who are more “real life” may be disappointing in their physical abilities. But again, they serve multiple purposes—and in Rite of Awakening, it’s the main character’s knee injury and reinjury that lead her to a second chance at love.
I guess you could say I put a lot of myself into my characters. They share my physical limitations, but they share my emotional epiphanies as well. It all advances who they are as facets of my inner world as they become avatars for my own exploration—and hopefully for my readers’ exploration.
Pain has a way of rooting us in the body, but it also opens unexpected doors in the soul—and sometimes, in the plot.
A Southern witch returns home. Secrets won’t stay buried. A chance to confront and heal—or face the consequences.
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