by
Jayne Denker
I write romantic comedies—emphasis on the
comedy part. I suppose I’d be able to write angst-filled dramas if I really
tried, but I’ve always believed that if I’m going to spend many months crafting
a decent story, and have a whole mess of characters taking up residence in my
head, I might as well be laughing the entire time.
However, there’s one thing I’ve learned: The
main character can’t have too much of the cray-cray. The reader is in that person’s
head and expects to sympathize with her or him. If the main character is too
weird, it alienates the reader.
So I reserve the highest level of insanity
for the peripheral players. They can be there for pure comic relief, or they
can play integral parts in the plot, or both, but whichever role you set for
them, you—and they—have the freedom to make them as bizarro as you like, with
fewer consequences.
I had a lot of fun writing my second book, Unscripted, about Faith Sinclair, a
high-powered TV producer who gets fired from her own show. She’s fun, and crazy
in her own way, but the people surrounding her are really off the rails—just the way I like it. She has a freeloading
stepbrother, a domineering movie producer mother who will only drink “pure glacier
water” (which Faith notes probably has mammoth poop in it), and Randy Barstow
(also known as Randy Bastard), the sexist head of the TV network who swears so
much he turns the air around him blue. Oh—and there’s Bea, a grouch of a studio
gate guard who hates Faith on principle, a few air-headed actors whom Faith has
to shepherd like wayward children, and others populating the story.
