I would ask myself why this character needs to be The Spook, like how would the story change if she was treated like the other characters? What does her mystery contribute to the story as a whole?
From what I gathered from reading the trope page and skimming through the examples, that character type is often a villain, or at the very least Ambiguously Evil, or they're a wild card in a setting that has lots of competing players and factions. Being The Spook makes them and/or the world as a whole scarier and more unsettling and/or mysterious, because the other characters can't figure out what they're going to do next, why they're doing what they're doing, who they might be working for, or some combination of the three.
"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."
My intuition is that what's quoted above is important: Make them a person, and they're likely to be interesting to some degree, I imagine.
Otherwise, I feel that the interesting thing about a "spook" is their mystery: Where do they go? What is their history? How do they know the things that they know? And so on. Playing with that might provide some additional interest to the character.
Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Mar 1st 2022 at 10:12:57 PM
My Games & Writing
I've got back into writing, and been giving my whole story a full-on Continuity Reboot, as previous ideas didn't work out.
So far, I've got a story with four major characters, and one of them, Kaitlyn (so far that's the name I came up with for her) is The Spook amongst the team.
She's a Nice Girl, but that's not her defining trait; she can be a Badass Bookworm at times.
The setting is one of White-and-Grey Morality, and the villains will have some redeeming features; they're more like Villain of the Week (or chapter).
It's not a dark and edgy setting, but not too lighter and softer, in the middle really.
As it is, it's not a full-on Crapsack World but it's not an awful place either.
The only problem is, how do you avoid cliches associated with The Spook character and make them interesting? What sort of cliches are associated with them?
I couldn't find anything in the So You Want To index on writing about this type of character.
They're not a Flat Character, I've already partially established their personality, their goals and motivations; and they're not a villain, they're good.
Is it unusual to have The Spook as one of the main characters in a work that's a Genre Mashup of Queer Media (I'm bigender, to be fair, AMAB bigender), a toned-down Conspiracy Thriller (to keep it family-friendly) and Alternate History. The Queer Media part isn't the main part of it though, and LGBT themes aren't touched on much in this.
Edited by Merseyuser1 on Feb 28th 2022 at 10:34:08 AM