Wednesday, February 23, 2011

A Closer Look at the Character Elisabeth Darling

Have you ever spent an entire day constructing what appeared to be the perfect sand castle only to tear it down? That is what it was like creating some of these characters for this book. I had never written anything that went in depth into anything past the characters raw emotions. In fact I had never tackled a project so big before. This whole thing caught me by surprise.

I'm sure there are at the very least a hundred different books on how to write a book. I didn't want to spend the money or waste the time to get a book, an instruction manual on how to reign in my imagination and turn all my crazy nightmares and day dreams into something so solid. These characters had jobs; they had more than just one or two emotions. They had families and reasons that they did the things that they did.

In my first stab at this I had given the name of Mary to my main character. Mostly because I was more focused on creating her, then I was on her name. The first thing I decided was that I was not going to have a cookie cutter heroine. There would be no killing without regret, no bloody struggle without a second thought about the consequences of her actions.

I think what was most important to me when I created Elisabeth was that she wasn't some super hero. I wanted people to look at her and feel her pain. When she loses her best friend she is thrown into this whole depression that seems to consume her very being. I feel like my readers can look at what she is going through at that point in her life and understand why she is drinking and why she seems to cry so often.

On the outside Elisabeth is the weakest person in my book. She only has her one friend and her job. She drinks a lot and fights nightmares. In the beginning she admits to running from her problems and keeping people at a safe distance from her. On her good (or bad depending on how you look at it) days Elisabeth is fully aware of the fact that she is special.The other days she pushes it so far to the back of her head that she isn't even aware on a conscious level that the powers even exist. There is one singular moment in the book that makes it so Elisabeth can never again forget that they are there. I won't tell you what it is, you have to just read the book and find out.

She has these flash backs of visions from the past that leave her feeling empty and drained emotionally. She knows that denying the visions will cause her physical pain in the form of migraines but to her it’s the better option. Once she finds her place on the Blue Moon Investigations Team she starts to get a reign of her emotions and her powers. That’s when she really starts to take control of what she's been told is her destiny.

The transformation from the Elisabeth you see in the beginning of the book to the Elisabeth in the end of the book is amazing. You get to watch her go from this emotionally crippled woman to someone who faces vampires and werewolves with not a lack of fear but rather an overwhelming surge of bravery. To me building this character was very much like building the perfect sand castle, then ripping it apart only to build it ten times better.

I hope you enjoyed today's in depth look at the main character of Elisabeth Darling. Next time I will be covering the next amazing character in my book. The mastermind behind getting the whole investigation for Molly's killers orchestrated, Akiko Nakamura.

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