Courtney Cole is a novelist who would eat mythology for breakfast if she could. She is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of If You Stay which features bad boy Pax Tate.
Courtney Cole definitely knows how to write a bad boy, and she wrote a guest post to tell us why she writes bad boys and what makes her bad boys special.
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So, everyone likes reading about bad boys, apparently. It’s something I quickly found out when my book If You Stay came out in February, and I got mountains of email about Pax Tate, the bad boy who the story centers around.
Bad boys are sexy as hell. For me, though, it’s not enough for the boy to be bad. He needs to be redeemable. He needs to be good deep down, not simply a tattooed asshole.
The idea behind my Beautifully Broken series is that most of us are broken in some way. Whether we’ve suffered a loss, a break-up, a divorce, etc, etc. Being broken in any way changes you, it molds you… it usually makes you stronger.
One of my favorite quotes is by Ernest Hemingway: “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong in the broken places.” It’s sort of the theme of my series. I write about people who do become stronger and more beautiful after they’re at their very lowest points.
In my latest book, If You Leave, which released Tuesday, I wrote about a broken Army Ranger, Gabriel Vincent. To me, he’s a complex enigma. He’s gorgeous and strong and sexy, but on the inside, he’s so very broken and vulnerable because of the things he saw in Afghanistan. He wears a mask and he puts on an act… because he can’t let anyone see him as weak. The problem is, he can’t control what happens when he sleeps. He quickly has to learn that even the very strongest can be weak, and they can’t always control everything that life throws at them.
This is pretty much the basis for my series. We can’t control what life throws at us. And the fact is, it’s going to throw us a curve ball from time to time—a spinning, hard, fast-ball curve. And when that happens, we have to catch it and throw it back.
My characters in the Beautifully Broken series do that. They are broken, they are hurt, they are vulnerable, but eventually, they see what they need to do to be whole. And that’s what they do. I really want to illustrate, through my characters, that even when life seems bleak and hard, there’s always light, there’s always a way to come out of it.
So, bottom line. It’s easy for me to write bad boys—or broken boys, because I always know that they’ll be fixed by the end of the book. I write about boys who are fixable, because to me, everyone is fixable if you just look hard enough.
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