The character is a young girl, 17-18, she belongs to a militant religious sect, at the moment a fictional sect, I've been trying to avoid actualy using the bible, koran or the Torah and Talmud. The sect is tasked with protecting the innocent, or the children of Able, from the supernatural. They are also shapeshifters, though they can only modify the basic human form, no turning into animals.

So the voice I'm looking for is a naive or innocent, who under the right circumstances is capable of a very casual brutality, throwing onto this a societal convention of dominance and subjugation woven in with their sex drive. Needless to say I'm having difficulty weaving this into a consistent voice.

You have the innocence and arrogance of youth, with a big layer of catholic guilt, but that is twisted with the dominance sex games that underlie alot of the heirarchy of her order, so her tone needs to be submissive with aggressive bursts, followed by guilt and pleasure fighting with each other.

A first person narrator/viewpoint character's ability to depict and interpret what's going on reliably is either established in an opening or established as subject to interpretation. Then whichever way a story goes, maintaining that trust or lack of trust informs a story.

There's a lot of conflicts in what's given, which can make for good character depth. There doesn't appear to me to be any plausibility issues. All the conflicts seem relevant and causally related to the given circumstances.

Resolving the conflicts then should be mostly a matter of the focal character becoming aware of them, discovery, seeking to understand them, and deciding how and what they mean and what to do about them, reversal.

The challenge I see with first person is a tendency to lose sight of theme and message from author surrogacy and its concommitent self-idealization and self-efficacy. Exploring the circumstances of a milieu without addressing a life-defining complication might tend toward a dramatic travelogue rather than a dramatic story.

Initial question: What's the complication as it relates to the theme? Acceptance or rejection? Faith or apostasy? Good or evil? and so on. From one of those conflicts, a complication might be discovery of the inherent contradictions of the religious order.

Next question: What happens if the protagonist fails in addressing the complication? What's at stake personally, privately, and publicly? Will the protagonist be burned at the stake for apostasy? Or will whatever successes be validated? Will the society be harmed or redeemed by the protagonist's success or failure?

What's the message? Religion's evil? Religion's imperfect? Humans imperfectly practice religion?

What's the final outcome? then is one more question that what's given raised in my mind.

Thanks that definately was a more articulate expression of what I'm trying to figure out.

What are her likes? Dislikes?

Her best friend? Why? Is this a new best friend (is she the kind of person who goes through best friends like tissues?) or someone she's known since childhood?

What are her secrets? What would someone who has known her since childhood know about her that she would be embarrassed about?

What's her favorite drink? Why?

What's her favorite food to eat? Are there any particular memories tied up in that? (e.g., loves goulash because grandma ule used to make it before grandma ule got sacrificed to the goddess Larta...so now MC can't eat it at all without almost vomiting.)

Sidenote: There's a quite hilarious bit in the new comedy Glee, where one of the MC boys has a vision that recurs to him when he's ... let's say "involved" with a girl. It's him driving, clearly new license, talking to his mom in the front seat, and then WHAM, he hits a mailman, cracks the windshield. It's hilarious in that unexpected horror kind of way, but also because it's cut into the kissing scenes as a sort of ... interruptus.

At any rate - it's an example of something that he doesn't want anyone to know, but it's somewhat of an intense feeling/sensation and when he experiences this vision he basically wants to flee whatever situation he's in.

Does your character have an analog? Something horrible that happened to her in childhood?

What does your MC want to do more than anything in the world?

If she won the lottery, how would she spend her winnings?

What does she want to study in school? (assuming such things are permissible in your culture.)

What kind of boy does she like?

What kind of boy does she like...but knows is not good for her to like (but she likes anyway...)?

Be wary of trying to make a 17/18 year old girl too naive, too innocent. That is not exactly an age of innocence for most teens (boys or girls.) It's an age of experimentation, testing boundaries, pushing out into the world, starting to really get a sense of who you are (and the horribly disorienting feeling that goes with figuring this out...that lostness...) Wanting to stretch out and away, but needing a safe place to come back to. It's a very peer-oriented age, teens are more influenced by their peers than their family (although the groundwork laid in childhood will reap returns in teen years...so you could explore a bit how her parents treated her as a child, to give some insights into what she's rebelling against/struggling against.)

I had a professor in college who claimed that there are no beliefs/morals/elements of character (outside of religion choice and political choice, which he felt were children's methods of rebelling/showing independence and almost as predictable because they were opposite parents in many cases) that didn't come from home. That our values are imbued in us day in and day out in our home environment and that even if we try, we can't break out of that mold that was cast as youngsters.

I'm not sure I believe him, exactly, but I do believe parents wield a tremendous influence over children...to a much greater extent than parents think they do, I think (because kids spend so much of their time telling us that we don't rule them...)

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Be wary of trying to make a 17/18 year old girl too naive, too innocent. That is not exactly an age of innocence for most teens (boys or girls.) It's an age of experimentation.

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I agree that this girl wouldn't really be that innocent unless she is isolated. I don't think that girls this age are really that naive, sixteen and under would be. Of course there are some people who are naive their entire life.

But if this girl is killing and sexually active, I don't think she would be one of those types of people.

If we're speaking of a person even 100 years ago, there is a great likelihood that there could be increased naivity due to cutural boundaries that made many things taboo. Not that all girls at that time would be naive, but this could be greatly related to socio-economic circumstances.

At times It Girl, at times cliquish and divisive, vein, greedy, yet fragile, sympathetic, and mechanically inept living china dolls promenading on a pedestal, they were the objects of desire, or at least perceived themselves that way and used their natural and contrived appearance advantages to manipulate and bend any vulnerable male to their wills. Stereotype, or character prototype as relates to creative writing, yes, but with deep and conflicted dimensions.

Wikipedia: List of female stock characters, The School Diva type perhaps comes closest to the above, some acted the Bimbo type or Dominatrix, etc., some with mothers of the Mother-in-law type like Endora from Bewitched.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_stock_characters

Don't let me get started on male stock characters, nor how Character Genre has evolved over the centuries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_character

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They projected naïveté when it suited their purposes

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I pretended to be naive a lot as a teenage girl, but not to be manipulative. I just didn't know how to respond when a boy made a suggestive comment, so I would act like I didn't understand.

It worked well for me because I was a good girl and people expected me to be naive.

I wonder if a lot of teenage girls do that?

Be careful to not make your female MC too...unlikeable. Girls make up a greater portion of readers, particularly in that 14-18 age range (when's the last time you saw a 16 year old boy with his nose buried in a book?)

A girl is going to want to relate to the POV girl. Make sure she has redeeming qualities, and endearing ones as well. We chicks don't like to read about poor, stupid, klutzy girls getting themselves into scrapes from which they must be rescued by some knight in shining armor. Unless we're reading in the romance genre (though even romance tends toward strong female leads these days.)

I guess my caution is that be careful to make sure your female POV character is still likable and strong in her own way (her strength can be hidden/revealed over the course of the story...she can seem naive in the beginning but over the course of the story we realize she's wise, if sometimes overly optimistic, for example.)

Does that make sense?

Ideally she will be both sympathetic and likeable, she is conflicted having to assist and even protect at times a creature that she loathes and that under normal situation she would kill.

I was definately thinking she would be more naive than innocent. The interview helped alot to flesh her out in my mind.

The story centered on the vampire, and she was originally an afterthought to create a contrasting POV and plot thread, but as she has fleshed out I am finding her story may prove more compelling.

Time will tell.