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I think as women we've always been very used to growing up reading and identifying with male protagonists, especially in fantasy. There's a saying in publishing that girls will read about boys, but boys will only read about boys, and it's important to give women strong heroines.
The Internet is the hope of an integrated world without frontiers, a common world without controlling owners, a world of opportunities and equality. This is a utopia that we have been dreaming about and is a world in which each and every one of us are protagonists of a destiny that we have in our hands.
I'm interested in flawed protagonists. I was raised on them.
The idea in The Man that Would Be King was that the music should recreate all that majestic surrounding and emphasize the adventure, but also speak about the frustration or, rather said, the curse of both protagonists, even before happened what happens them.
Women are never the protagonists; we're always reactionary against everything that's done to us. I like people who write for women that have got a bit more about them.
Everyone likes a bit of variety. I'm sure none of my readers only want to read about anti-heroes or villainous protagonists any more than they only want to read about square-jawed heroes doing the right thing. I just write characters than entertain me and hope they'll be ones that other people want to read about, too.
With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family.
A true nature is a gloomy monolith, sort of like that old black rotary phone that I had to sing 'Happy Birthday' to Grandpa on. But novelists, damn us, still need true natures - so we can give them to our protagonists. And so readers can vaguely predict how they'll behave when we trap them in 'situations' that they can't IM their way out of.
Look at the Coen brothers. All their minor characters are as interesting as their protagonists. If the smaller characters are well-written, the whole world of the film becomes enriched. It's not the size of the thing, but the detail.
I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels - more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul.