It genuinely puzzles me…

I read a lot. A few books a week usually. I have a to-read-list in a notebook and I jot down the titles of anything I come across on social media or anything recommended to me that sounds like my kind of thing. I am a bit fussy – I’ll admit that – but there isn’t much I won’t read other than romance and erotica. I’m not mad keen on fantasy in its typical form but I will read anything paranormal, supernatural or magical.

I don’t consider myself a reading snob. I do have a few favourite authors of whom I will happily devour every new release they put out. I’m not majorly into the classics and I read graphic novels and comic books as well as traditional books.

But there is one thing that annoys me and frustrates me more than anything else and I just keep coming across it – more often than not in traditionally published books with amazing sales and thousands of reviews…

Authors who forget to create characters!

Now, bear with me. Obviously these authors don’t pen books with no characters, expecting the location and plot to carry themselves. But it does feel a bit like this:

Author checklist

location: researched, described beautifully – check

plot – ironed out, checked over, worked through, twists and turns, no plot holes – check

research into topic – yup, done – check

writing skills/talent – yep, can string a sentence together and construct a story – check

characters – oh, they’ll do. – check

NOOOOO!

They won’t do. ‘Any old character’ will not do. I’m genuinely getting sick of it so excuse me if this comes across as a bit of a rant. Before I talk about the lack of characterisation that has driven me crazy lately in numerous books I’ve read, (and I won’t be naming them, to be fair to the authors) let me first tell you about a book that has got its characters right.

I am currently reading Deadly Animals by Marie Tierney. It’s a crime thriller about a serial killer and its set in 1980s Birmingham, UK. It’s the author’s debut novel which I find incredibly exciting as I would happily read anything else she releases. I won’t go into the plot too much but essentially the main character is a 13 year-old girl called Ava, who has the unusual hobby of searching for and studying dead animals. It’s while doing this she comes across the body of the first victim, a teenage boy she knew. Ava is quite simply a memorable character. She is smart, wise beyond her years, fiercely loyal to her friends and her dysfunctional family, and she is constantly one step ahead of the police in solving the crimes. However, the other characters are also wonderfully drawn. Her best friend John has his own personality, life and background, as do the two detectives Delahaye and Lines. I would argue that Delahaye is another main character along with Ava, but Lines is just as well realised.

Let me put it simply. There are two detectives investigating and they have different personalities. You know, like real people do in real life. They look different but they also sound different. I can tell them apart and I don’t just mean by their different names. They have particular ways of saying things, little gestures or mannerisms that are mentioned here and there, they have different ways of responding to the brutal scenes they witness and so on. These characters will stay in my head for a long time and although the plot is brilliant and the writing gorgeous, personally, I need to care about the characters to care about the plot.

Is it just me?

I keep imagining how I would feel about this book if the author had not created her characters so vividly. I would want to know who was killing the children and why and I would enjoy the investigation’s progress in revealing the killer. I’d appreciate the location and research gone into the story and plot. But would I care about Ava? About John, and Delayhaye and Lines? No. I wouldn’t.

And when you don’t care about the characters it makes it very hard to care what happens next…

Okay, onto the books that annoyed me recently. There have been too many but I’m going to talk about two. The first was marketed as a found footage style horror story. The blurb intrigued me and I bought it because it came up in a book group I’m in on Facebook. I added it to my to-read list months ago and finally got around to reading it recently. The story was interesting. A reporter who fears losing her job asks if she can investigate some footage that has gone viral online and her boss agrees.

The main character decides to head to the last known location of the missing friends (on her own) to find out. Despite numerous warnings and red flags on the way, (the locals are either vile to her, downright creepy and pervy, or try to tell her to go home) but she ignores them and gets to the location, which by the way, is totally secluded. I was already tiring of this character. Why would you do that? Why would you go alone?

Anyway, what then follows was a series of bad decisions on her part and the whole story stepped up a gear as she began to unravel what was going on. The plot itself was fine. It had twists and turns. I didn’t guess what was going on. But I truly did not care…

There were times when the main character was running for her life, or hiding from danger, or crying down the phone and there were times when it seemed she was about to be killed… but I did not care. I had no attachment to her whatsoever in fact I started to wish she would get killed because there was just no point in her. Zero.

The other characters were just as bad. You couldn’t tell them apart. They had different genders and different names, if that helps? That was about it. Oh, they looked different. You know, some girls had blonde pixie cuts and some boys has brown curly hair or whatever. But when they spoke they all sounded the same.

What the author did here was come up with a good horror story – a bit of a Blair Witch, if you like, and there is nothing wrong with that. What the author did not do was create any characters. He gave them names, but the main character, for example, could have been anyone. I could not tell you a single thing about her personality other than her vocation and that in my opinion she was a bit dim to go out there on her own.

Okay, the next one was similar. It was a crime thriller and part of a series. Needless to say, I won’t be reading any more in the series and I am genuinely confused about the amount of positive reviews these books have. The writing was fine, the locations were fine, the plot was fine. It involved two private investigators, one man, one woman, who I believe appear in all the books. This time they had been hired to try and solve the cold case of a missing teenage girl. There were two notorious and now behind bars, serial killers in that area at time, which made it a tad interesting. But also, I guessed really early on who had actually killed the girl.

But back to the characters. The man and the woman. That was the only way I could tell them apart. She had a son. He also had no personality and said things that any of them could have said. None of them had any mannerisms or nuances of personality. There was some back story, obviously, as its part of a series, but that didn’t seem to help give them personalities. If you met these people in real life you would be bored stiff in minutes. They were so forgettable, so banal, so pointless…

I just didn’t care.

But maybe it’s just me? Plenty of reviewers seemed to love these books but personally, I want to feel something for the characters, even if its hate and loathing! I want them to stand out from each other and everyone else. I want them to have back story, past trauma, motivations and hidden desires. I want them to be flawed and interesting and funny and smart, and, well, anything that makes them human!

I won’t be going back to those authors to find any of that.

I truly think there are two types of writers out there. Those who come up with a great idea, a concept, a plot and a way to weave it all together. They then have to shove some characters into the plot to do the heavy lifting.

And there are those that come up with everything, maybe not all at once, but bit by bit, both plot and characters developing alongside each other. Those that know the story is the character. The character is the story.

There would be no story without the character. Yes, work on the plot, weave that magic, keep the reader hooked, write beautifully and do your research… yes, yes, yes. But please, please, for the love of my sanity, remember to create the characters as well. And put the same amount of effort into them!

Genuinely though – is it just me?