CRUSHING ON MY PROTAGONIST

Novelist Joanna Howard on why you need to love your characters

“When I was a teenager I kept a picture of Daniel Day Lewis in a heart-shaped frame on my night table. These are some of the fiercest crushes I’ve lived through, and some of my worst breakups.”

My earliest writings are still some of my finest. In junior high, because I was a ham, I pandered to my friends by writing Choose Your Own Adventure stories in which they were the protagonists. These stories were written in second person, and focused on romance plots (“You are standing on a windswept moor at twilight, the sun is setting behind your amber locks, you are lit like a fiery torch...” etc.) and they were populated by characters from popular films. My chosen form was the diamond-shaped folded note, and length was constrained by the maximum width of notebook pages that when thus folded would still slide through the air vent of a locker.

The recipient chose the character/actor who currently held real estate in their heart, I drafted three or four fairly PG sexy adventures based on scenes …