Writing Megan
The character who changed everything
There’s a moment, partway through drafting THE SECRET LIFE, when Megan stopped doing what I’d planned for her.
I'd sketched her, as I sketch every character, with a fairly clear map of where she needed to go and why. But somewhere around the middle of the book, she started making decisions that didn't quite match the map. Not wildly out of character – nothing that broke the story – but choices with a harder edge than I’d originally given her, driven by a logic that was entirely hers rather than entirely mine. It’s one of the strangest parts of writing fiction: the sense that a character you invented has started, in some small way, to insist on herself.
The starting point
Megan doesn't begin THE SECRET LIFE as anyone’s idea of a schemer. She begins it as a widow – blindsided by her husband's death, and then blindsided a second time by what his death reveals. Two children depend on her. The comfortable life she thought she had turns out to be considerably less secure than she believed. She isn't looking for trouble. She's looking for a way through.
That starting position mattered enormously to me. A character who begins in crisis, rather than in comfort, earns a kind of latitude from the reader that a character with options doesn't get. I wanted every choice Megan made afterwards to be legible against that starting point – not excused by it, but explained by it.
Understandable, not likeable
Early on, I made a decision about Megan that shaped everything else: she didn’t need to be liked. She needed to be understood.
Those are different jobs, and conflating them is one of the more common traps in this genre. A character who is written purely to be liked tends to make safe, palatable choices – and safe, palatable choices don't generate the kind of pressure a novel like this depends on. Megan needed to make decisions that a reader, from the comfort of their own settled life, might well judge. My job wasn't to soften those decisions. It was to make sure that, seen from inside Megan’s situation rather than from outside it, each one made a grim kind of sense.
That discipline – staying inside her logic even when it leads somewhere uncomfortable – is, I think, the real engine of sympathy in fiction. We don't root for people because they’re perfect. We root for them because we can see the shape of the trap they’re in, and we're honestly not sure we'd have done any better ourselves.
Where she surprised me
There’s a point in the book where Megan makes a decision – one that many will find questionable, disturbing. I won't say what it is; it sits close enough to the heart of the book that I'd rather readers meet it afresh. But I remember sitting back from the keyboard afterwards and thinking: is this going to alienate her in the mind of the reader? But that's the part of writing I find hardest to explain to people outside it, the part where the character forces you to take a risk. It usually means the character has become solid enough to have her own momentum.
What the reviews told me
One of the loveliest things anyone has said about THE SECRET LIFE came from a “Reader’s Favorite” review, which described Megan as one of the reviewer’s favourite characters. It's the kind of line that means more to me than almost any plot compliment could, because it tells me the original instinct held – that a woman under enormous pressure, making difficult and sometimes questionable choices, still came across as a person worth caring about rather than a cautionary tale.
Over to you
Have you ever made a decision you knew wasn't wise, but that felt, at the time, like the only one actually available to you? I'd genuinely like to hear about it – you can drop me a line at robbie@robbievale.com
If you'd like to spend more time with Megan, Megan’s World (on robbievale.com) has bonus content exploring her story in more depth. THE SECRET LIFE is available now on Amazon.