Who is he?

Has anyone seen the film Paddington? The first one. Bear with me (bear, Paddington, geddit? No? Ahem moving on then). A talking bear from Peru is adopted by a nice ordinary family from London called The Browns and has a wild adventure (or 2 hence the sequel). What am I talking about, you may well ask and what has this to do with writing a novel. Stay with me, I'm coming to that. You see Mrs Brown is an illustrator for stories but she's struggling to bring her hero to life. And that, my friends, is the connection. *lightbulb*

I'm struggling to bring my hero to life. He has a name (Michael), he has a job (vet). He even has a vagueish description but he's not real. He doesn't seem part of the story. Of course with this being chick-lit, he's going to be my heroine's perfect man, she just doesn't know that yet, but I'm having real struggles in fitting him into the story. He's one of those awkward shaped jigsaw pieces. You know it fits in somewhere but it's just not connecting with any of the existing pieces on the board.

So who is this mystery man of mine? I wish I knew. Given that my heroine hasn't mentioned much about her previous love life or relationships prior to this story beginning, it is safe to assume she hasn't had any major love trauma in her life to sour her against men. So for any good chick-lit romance, it has to be Michael with the issue. So I need a back story for him and it needs to be engaging yet it also needs to be fixable otherwise this is not going to be the happy ending we expect. I've had several ideas run through my head, and whilst all of them seem workable, none of them are inspiring me to bring Michael leaping off the page and into the hearts of my readers.

I'm sure it's there, I'm sure as soon as I find the right history for him, I'll fall in love with him and therefore so will my heroine. Until then, I keep searching for my Mr Darcy, my Edward Rochester, my Rupert Campbell-Black (seriously!)

The words will come to me one day

Scribbling off

Angie