Good morning, and welcome to day #3 of my week hosting Behind the Scenes here at Novelspot.

If we’ve done our job as authors, readers will identify deeply with our characters and root for them. Readers may get furious when a character does something that can only lead to disaster, but they’ll hang in there, convinced there must have been some reason and hoping against hope for that happy ending in the world of romance. Yet sometimes that’s the hardest part of crafting the book. We want our characters to be believable, flawed rather than perfect; we want them to have to grow and develop across the arc of the story. But there’s always a risk of making them so deeply flawed that readers hate them or find them not deserving.

If characters didn’t have flaws, would we love them so much? I think that’s part of what draws me to Kate, in The Diary. She’s tenacious and driven once she’s made up her mind; she’s out for vengeance, convinced her little sister’s been ravaged by a rake and determined to make him pay. To claim her happy ending, Kate has to face herself, admit she was wrong, and change.

We haven’t met all the flaws of our prairie heroine yet, but on this prairie trip we’re constantly finding metaphors that will help us understand her. Monday afternoon we saw an exhibit at the National Grasslands visitor center in Wall, SD that showed what happens to grasses and soil when the grass cannot send down deep tap roots. Those roots hold the soil in place and support a broader canopy above ground, providing shade that helps retain moisture and preventing weeds from taking hold. We think she’ll probably need some deep roots through tough times, and she’ll understand the connection between her heritage and her character.

When settlers first began crossing the Great Plains, they viewed it as one great flaw in the middle of an abundant land, a desolate wasteland to be traversed on the dangerous route to greener grass. We’re finding much beauty in that very desolation; when crafted well, the same can be said of character flaws.

Adriana