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We Need To Talk About Maia
So I guess this isn’t so much about inspirations as much as me talking about why I like to write complex characters. Especially secondary characters. Case in point, I present to you Maia Brighton. (Somewhere Jennifer Zeffer just hissed.) So Maia shows up first in Dungeon Games. She’s Derek Brighton’s ex-wife, and to say they have a complex relationship would be an understatement. Karina meets her shortly after she and Derek have agreed to explore a relationship while they’re looking for a serial killer—as one does. Maia is high powered and over the top, and doesn’t ask Derek’s permission to out him as a member of a BDSM club. What she sees is a chance to move up at the district attorney’s office. Sounds shallow. She’s just the bitter ex who slept around on him and he’s the stalwart ex-soldier who won’t let it happen again.
Except there’s genuinely more to it. They married young. Very young. And then he went into the Army and she was left behind to figure out what she wanted out of life. When he comes back, he’s a different person and so is she. Maia loves Derek. She states plainly that she loves Derek more than she’s ever loved anyone, with the exception of herself. She’s an omnivore when it comes to her sex life and pretty terrible to work for. Yet throughout the series the group knows they can go to her when they need help. For a price, of course.
I like writing Maia the same way I like writing Declan in the Thieves series. They’re actually very close in nature, though a lot of readers have way more sympathy for Declan. Declan has done some genuinely terrible things, but he does love his brother and comes to appreciate Zoey and Daniel. The core of each is the fact that they love something else more. For Declan it’s himself and his crown. For Maia it’s herself and her career.
I’ve done characters like this a lot. I like to call them my truth tellers because they say the hard things…I was going to say even when it hurts, but I guess they really say the hard things because it doesn’t hurt at all. My truth teller characters range from the good, like Charlotte, to the neutral—I would put Maia in this category as she does do some good, Declan, too—to the pretty much bang-on evil, and the epitome of that character is Julia Ennis from the Reloaded series. In many ways there’s a straight line from Charlotte Taggart to Julia Ennis, and it goes through Maia.
I love taking these characters I’ve written and putting them in different situations with different forces to shape them and see how they come out. I think that’s the heart of creating complex characters. Being able to see the evolution of those characters teaches me as much about myself as about my writing style.
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