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I was lucky enough to catch a few minutes of Gillian Flynn speaking at the Celebration of the Book at the Grand Rapids Public Library Main Branch this weekend. She talked about writing difficult characters, something that's close to my own heart as I was recently told I have a "natural affinity for tough-to-like characters"

It's a fair cop. Katya in Real Life & Liars provokes the strongest reactions out of the whole cast. The whole family is problematic to say the least, but readers tend to really dislike her. Of course, I found her very interesting to write.

Flynn is the author of the psychological thrillers Sharp Objects and Dark Places. I don't know her work yet but I intend to read her now (and I'm disappointed I had to miss her signing to prepare for my own session.) She told us some of the ways she made her narrator Camille palatable, despite her extreme behavior.

Camille, for one thing, is self-aware, and regards her screwed-up self with a sense of wry, black humor. Flynn also made sure she was an underdog, and further, she doled out clues to Camille's psyche carefully throughout the book so that it was a "whodunit" of a different sort.

Flynn said when she sat down to right her next book, about the lone survivor of her family's massacre, she set out to make Libby a stable, mature and functional character. Her husband read an early draft and then asked her a pointed question: Do you like Libby? Do you like writing about her?

The answer was a resounding "No." She didn't feel real, and she was far too boring.

So Flynn started over from scratch.

"It's kind of not up to you as a writer to decide if they're going to be mostly good or mostly bad," Flynn said. She re-cast Libby as a lazy, lying, manipulative, raging kleptomaniac which, besides making her much more interesting, made much more sense for the lone survivor of such a horrific trauma.

Flynn read from the opening of Dark Places, in which narrator Libby describes her soul as looking like "a scribble, with fangs" and the audience issued a collective, "Oooooooh". Indeed, a delighted shudder ran through us.

Flynn reported that her editor said she was walking "a fine line" with Libby, but based on the audience's reaction, that was a line worth walking.

Would anyone have said "ooooooh" about the upright, stable Libby? Perhaps such a character would be an easier read for 300 pages but easier is not always better.

I applaud Gillian Flynn and all the writers out there who open up dark places in their own minds to write difficult, thorny, prickly characters, because it is a fine line to walk. Though readers may enjoy a defective protagonist, they still want someone to root for, someone they can stand to walk with for hours on end. It's a difficult literary maneuver to execute, but then, nothing worth doing is easy.