There are numerous defining aspects to what makes a character in a novel or short story, an outlier.
This is shaped by societal and cultural values, or more directly by prejudice. Size, race, ‘foreign’ origins are just some elements that create the outlier fence.
This deepens when layers of social and professional barriers are erected making the outlier, who ascribes to individual ways of expression, an ‘outsider’ rather than a unique contributor to society.
Regardless of the category/label attached to the outlier, it’s divisive, destructive, and a living death for the character experiencing the hell of being (mis) treated as such.
The outlier syndrome is growing in society, slouching back to outdated values, and emerging new forms of prejudice in how individuals treat each other. Literature should mirror life in all its ugliness, hopes and dreams. While we read to lose ourselves in the pages of a good book, what is the experience worth if it does not linger with the ills evident in society, and the hope that we have the capacity to be change agents? Writing purely on the prejudice of life without the yardstick or suggestion on how this ‘disease’ can be overcome, would be remiss on my part, in particular, in any story I tell. Writers are change makers by opening our minds and voices to what needs rectifying. This is the beauty and at times the daunting reality of being a writer.
Hardship is a fact of life for the majority of the worlds’ population. This is not defined by financial issues alone. My novels capture these issues from death, parting relationships, loneliness, cultural pressures, past psychological and physical traumas, and more.
In each situation, an individual or character is an outlier by choice or societal prejudice.
Literature offers that connection to the outlier’s suffering and hope for redemption and redefinition. Reading is imperative, words linger and dwell deep in the readers’ psyche as a visual and emotional connection to the situations and events the outlier might experience.
Souls of her Daughters reveals that the outlier syndrome affects all regardless of professional or social position. Dr Grace Sharvin struggles with her secret, making her an outlier in her family- in her need to conceal her pain from her mother and sister. Her sister, Patience, is an outlier through interracial adoption in apartheid South Africa, forcing her to acknowledge her birth culture. Across Time and Space and the sequel Vindication Across Time unveil both Meryl Moorecroft and Marcia Ntlui as outliers in personal, cultural and professional contexts. Michael Morrissey, a human rights lawyer, becomes the outsider in his relationship with Meryl when the course of their lives change. Housekeeper, Ana Kuznetsov and Boris Malakov are outliers in their complicated families. Global landscapes invite the notion that the situations characters undergo are not isolated – shaping the universality of human angst and joy.
The Rain, a Collection of Short Stories presents this notion in the human capacity for good and evil.
Drama, crime and abduction bring high entertainment value to the reader, but beneath the layers lie the human face and soul of the outlier. The character should be carefully crafted to invite empathy or repulsion by stripping away layers that shroud the essence of human angst and joy.
The continuation of ‘Souls of Her Daughters,’ in the next saga, Chosen Lives, grows in representing the outlier theme with glimmers of a futuristic world where perfection resides in imperfection.
Let’s continue to create stories that leave a lingering message.
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