The Characters Who Refused To Be Minor

Every writer has them. The characters you built for a purpose — a plot function, a narrative requirement, a single scene that needed filling — who turn around somewhere around chapter three and inform you, with considerable conviction, that they have no intention of being what you designed them to be. They are going to be something larger. They were always going to be something larger. You just didn’t know it yet.

Flick Cooper was supposed to be a plot device.

I say this with full honesty and no apology, because understanding what she was supposed to be is the only way to appreciate what she became. Flick existed, initially, to explain Finn. Specifically, to explain why Finn had let himself go so badly — why a man with his capacity and his history had arrived at the state he was in when Marc found him. The answer was Flick. His sister. The one their father had sold, the one Finn had spent years quietly destroying himself to protect, the financial calculation he made every time he chose not to eat so the money could go somewhere it mattered more than feeding him. She was backstory. She was the why behind the wound.

She had other ideas.

Flick dug her heels in somewhere in the drafting and simply refused to leave. Not loudly — that’s the thing about Flick, she is not always loud about what she wants, she is simply immovable once she has decided — but with a persistence that made it increasingly clear that she was not going to be filed under ‘plot function’ and left there. She wanted the full story. She wanted the complexity. She wanted the band she’d built with Izabella, and she wanted Izabella with her, and she pulled both of them out of the margins and into the centre with the quiet stubbornness of someone who has survived considerable things and has decided she is owed a story of her own.

And she was right. She was absolutely right. Flick is one of the most specific and fully alive characters in the Compass Point universe, and she became that by refusing to be less than she was. She brought Izzy with her — Marc’s daughter, sixteen, a musician finding her way inside a family that is considerably more complicated than most — and the two of them together changed the texture of the books in ways I could not have planned and would not trade.

If I have to choose, though — if I have to identify the characters outside of Marc and Finn who carry the most weight with me — I always come back to Knox and Garrett.

These two arrived with their own gravity and they never let it go.

What strikes me most about Knox and Garrett is this: they may be more broken than Marc and Finn. I say that with full understanding of how much that means, given what Marc and Finn have been through. But the breaking is different. Marc and Finn’s damage has a specific shape — it comes from specific origins, it was done to them by specific forces, and its edges are, with enough time, mappable. Knox and Garrett’s damage is the kind that builds slowly, that comes from the accumulation of right choices made in impossible circumstances, from carrying things that are too heavy for too long in the service of people who need them to keep standing.

Knox’s hearing is going. He carries this quietly, which is the most Knox possible response to something that would destroy most people’s sense of themselves. Garrett’s nights are a war zone he navigates alone, or has until now. Both of them are people who have done everything right and paid the full cost of doing everything right, and the love between them — ten years of it, unacknowledged, held in trust because naming it felt more dangerous than carrying it — is the love of two people who have protected everyone except each other.

They bear equal weight with me. That is the truest thing I can say about them. I hold them as carefully as I hold Marc and Finn, which is saying a great deal.

Flick refused to be a device. Knox and Garrett refused to be minor characters. They were all right. Some of the best things in the Compass Point universe exist because the characters themselves demanded them.

I have learned to listen when they dig their heels in.

— Avery