There’s nothing like a colorful description to transport you from your favorite comfortable reading spot right into the middle of a book’s action. I love when an author is able to use language in such an immersive way. But my favorite literary color has always been gray.
I read a lot. I don’t discriminate by genre though I do tend to gravitate towards books that are real, that are gritty. Even if there is a happy ending, I want the characters to have earned it. They should be test, tried and found wanting. That’s how you see what someone is truly made of. That’s when the politeness ends, the public persona slips away and the true character is revealed.
And let’s face it, we live in a gray world. It’s often hard to tell who the heroes and the villains are. Heroes in one story could end up the villains in another. I get that we are talking fiction here, but in my opinion the best fiction mirrors real life. And in real life, there are no pure good guys or completely villainous characters. Think about all those news accounts of serial killers where a reporter interviews the unwitting neighbor who tells the world how shocked she is because her neighbor was always so nice and considerate, kept his lawn mowed and smiled and waved as he came and went. Does that guy sound evil to you? Me either. But we can agree that he has extremely evil tendencies. And what of the man who saves a woman from an assault only to expect a little something in return? Hero or villain?
I don’t mean to pick on men. There are plenty of female examples as well. It’s human nature. Morality, ethics, character. These are a constant sliding scale. An inner struggle. And it’s precisely that inner struggle that makes a character memorable and real. Too many stories telegraph the white hats and the black hats. That doesn’t work for me. What that does is keep me from the escape I seek in my fiction. It stops me from inserting myself into the story, relating to its characters. It screams “this is fiction!”
I like characters that are fully fleshed out. They have real thoughts and react unexpectedly sometimes, as we all do, when they’re under pressure. I love it when hidden motivations come to light that make you see the book you are reading in a whole new light, making the little details and nuances at the beginning mean so much more than they did on the surface when you first read them. I don’t want my narrators to be angels, to be 100 percent reliable. Who among us is, really?
We are all biased. We are all at least a little self serving. We all want to win. So when an author celebrates this human truth instead of pushing it aside because it is inconvenient to the story they want to tell, that’s when I know I’ll love their book. Because we all live in the gray. And I thing that’s great. In the gray is where all the interesting stuff happens.
