Character Change

So I started writing my current book, Pigs Fly, with a fairly clear idea of the main characters but only a vague idea of the side characters.  Now that I have most of the plotline written in disorganized bits and pieces, I've started to look for holes and places that could be fleshed out.  I realized I needed to truly develop some of the side characters, especially those that will star in the books to come.  The next book will be all about Connor's mentor in a community theater, Gayle.  When I started the book, I had a vague idea of a white older lady in a wheelchair, some matronly sort who was all put together and professional.

But Gayle runs a community theater, and I haven't been able to convince the character to get a real job.  She's only 61, and I keep trying to talk her into a profession.  Today, I sat down and spent some bonding time with her.  I realized everything about my prior vision was wrong.  Her voice sounded way too much like my other side characters.

First off, she's not white.  She's ethnically Japanese with no emotional connection to her culture, which frustrates her.  So many main characters, particularly in romance novels, are just white.  White is treated as normal even though more and more people have some minority blood in them or identify as other.

Second off, the wheelchair never really fit with my vision of her character.  No, Clark, the male main character, will be wheelchair-bound.  Gayle's going to be diabetic.  You see, a lot of people like to think that disabilities are rare.  To read fiction, you'd think they NEVER or almost never happened.  But in my experience, if you don't see a person's disabilities, it's probably because you don't know them as well as you think.  I rarely meet a person without at least a minor disability.  One of mine is insomnia.  That isn't an obvious disability like blindness or being wheelchair-bound, but it can make for some really bad days.  So many people I meet seem "normal" at first, but then they turn out to have dyslexia or OCD or auto-immune disorder or ADD or depression or anxiety or deafness in one ear or something.  Some of these issues are disabling while some are merely inconvenient.   It is, from my experience, a rare person that is TRULY free of ALL disabilities.  We are just culturally trained to avoid showing it, sometimes even to ourselves.  So many of us want to be seen as normal without realizing normal isn't the norm if it exists at all.

So as Gayle introduced herself, I realized her mom and grandparents had to become super Americans during WWII, thereby turning their backs on all things Japanese.  Here she is, several decades later with a rebellious hippie streak, a crazy fashion sense, and no idea what it even means to be Japanese.  She is culturally lost and in search of her roots as she tries to be a Japanese hippie artist, working through the symptoms of the same type of diabetes that took her father and expressing herself through art and community theater.  She zips around everywhere on her 70's bike, trying to brighten the world one play, one canvas at a time. I've read romances--not many but a few--centering on a middle-aged white matron.  But I haven't read this story.  And like all stories that intrigue me of late, it starts to get at the human condition.