Developing Your Female Protagonist by Lyn McFarlane
Meredith Griffin is the main protagonist of The Scarlet Cross. She's a highly qualified emergency nurse with a psychiatric specialty, who runs the emergency ward in a Catholic hospital, set on the stormy pacific northwest coast. She has a slight case of OCD and, at the start of the story, suffers from a strong dependence on benzodiazepines. She is also fiercely protective of the vulnerable, including her younger sister, Bella, who lives with schizophrenia, and her patients, who are often vulnerable young women.
Creating Meredith was like floating in the sea - she came to me in steady, pulsating swells. My original intention was to write a story about caregivers, so Meredith being a nurse fit this perfectly. I also wanted her to be the main caregiver within the family - but I didn't want her to take on the traditional role of mother. Rather, I wanted Meredith thrust into the caregiver role when she was young. So the older sister image fit perfectly: the older sister who is the sole caregiver to a young sibling with a serious mental health condition.
I also wanted Meredith poised on a new relationship - I wanted the reader to see what it’s like for a woman who has been betrayed by her father to begin to trust a man again.
Meredith’s appearance and physicality came quite a bit more slowly. For some of my characters, physical appearance is one of the first things that comes to me, but Meredith took time. Her family story, her history, her mental health, her mindset - these things came first. Her OCD and anxiety just made sense, her drive to save patients chimed with her caregiving sensibilities, her stubbornness, fortitude and independence all got layered up - then, and only then, did her face and physicality appear.
Developing a character is, for me, very much like watching a figure slowly emerge from the fog. But this slow development is punctuated by images of them in action - early on I imagined how Meredith would move through the emergency department, full of contained energy and fire; I imagined how she would linger over a glass of wine with her friend; how tense her body would be as she watched with concern as her sister fell asleep after a psychotic episode, her medication slowly taking hold.
All of these images came to me like lightening, and they helped me call forth that fully formed person out of the fog so that, in the end, Meredith Griffin stood before me.
But even now, with The Scarlet Cross finished, parts of Meredith Griffin remain mysterious. In my next book she reappears to confront a new challenge, but she still has much to reveal to me. So, in many ways, our relationship is just beginning.
About The Book
When the elevator lurches to a stop and the doors open, she can’t help the shudder that runs through her. It’s Sunday, late afternoon, and she’s alone, but she never really feels alone when she’s in the tunnels of the hospital.
Nurse Meredith Griffin runs St. Jude Hospital's emergency ward, the largest on the Pacific Northwest coast. A psychiatric nursing specialist, she’s good at managing other people’s problems but is less adept with her own. When a twenty-two-year-old woman is admitted to Emergency with severe lacerations that prove fatal, her death is labelled a suicide, but Meredith isn’t convinced. Soon after, her boyfriend, Detective Leo Donnelly, attends the scene of a young woman with the same mysterious fatal injuries, and Meredith knows something is terribly wrong.
As she tries to connect the dots, Meredith quickly realises that everyone – in the hospital, the Catholic church and law enforcement – is hiding something, and she must put more than her job on the line to expose the killer before they strike again.
A clever and compulsive crime thriller, The Scarlet Cross takes you deep into the dark secrets of institutional power and exposes the thin membrane between safety and peril.
Lyn McFarlane is a Canadian-Australian writer who splits her time between Sydney, and Vancouver Island. She’s a former freelance journalist and holds degrees in economics, journalism and law. Lyn is a member of the Australian Society of Authors and the Crime Writers of Canada, a graduate of The Faber Academy and a mentee with the Australian Writers’ Mentorship Program. Her debut novel The Scarlet Cross won the 2019 Arthur Ellis Unhanged award for best unpublished manuscript.