The gift

As it's Christmas, I thought I'd talk about the different forms that gifts can take.  As writers, we think we have a gift for selecting and arranging words, a gift for telling a story.

But what about the gifts the characters who appear in our stories have?  We like our heroines and heroes to be gifted people, blessed with some extraordinary talent, even if that talent is for surviving the worst that the world can throw at them.  But often they have the gift of passion.  They're doing the thing they were born to do, and loving it.

Both Ren and Bryn in the Panthera books are gifted individuals.  Ren has always been in love with wild animals, and there was never any doubt that she'd follow in her mother's footsteps and become a wildlife conservationist.  She's especially passionate about saving big cats, and willing to travel into danger and across the vastness of human space to save them.  Bryn has always been a geek, following in his father's footsteps from an early age,  Bryn's gift is for AI programming, and that gift has now been returned to him in the most marvellous way, the blossoming of sentience in Pan.

But sometimes the 'gift' your character is given isn't so welcome. What if a career girl becomes pregnant by mistake?  The 'gift' of a child will derail her career for years.  Will she keep the baby and find new peace as a mother?  Or will she have an abortion, be outcast from her family, and become one of the richest women in the world?

There's lots of scope for using gifts to create dramatic tension in stories.  Unwanted presents from an ex-lover, a thoughtless present from someone a character really loves, the gift that becomes a double-edged sword when the recipient discovers the price of owning it later.

Have a merry Christmas, and have fun creating gifts for your characters.