This month we look at the care and feeding of characters. How do we create them? How do we nurture them moving forward. This month, D. Z. talks about the Wanee mysteries, making the point that when writing, you must know the characters as well as you know your family. Janet discusses how she creates characters and how they grow through several books.
Enjoy!
So, you have an idea for a great mystery. Of course, it is nothing without the characters, all of them, from protagonists, through villains, through the second bananas. Even the dead body.
It is not enough to give the characters names; you need to know them like family. And, yes, names are important. Especially in a series where it is essential to know who each person is and how they will persist. In other words, what is to become of them. For instance, a tight little name, like Mrs. Gibson (The Wanee Mysteries), should belong to a busybody bent on her own self-aggrandizement, a woman anxious that some young upstart might overtake her preeminence. The sort of woman who worries about how things appear — all the time. A woman who might begin as an antagonist and, through a series of trials, become a stalwart supporter of the protagonist as the series progresses.
In other words, characters need to be carefully delineated. Every single one, even the bad guys. Maybe the bad guys most of all. They just want to be loved, despite their flaws. Sometimes, they’re no different than the good guys; sometimes, they are just in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and did the wrong thing. That’s why they are so great. You need to unravel them, revealing their sins — slowly, while letting them play willingly amongst the good guys. Who, as you probably know, can go bad on you. Bam. Just like that.
You might begin with a man who shows every sign of being a romantic hero, only to discover that his past is filled with killing, pain and loss. He needs a great name or two himself, especially if he is going to hang around your series. Mine’s named Sebastian Kanady. He owns/operates/and prints the daily newspaper in Wanee, Illinois. He’s a complicated sort of guy, the type every girl’s mother tells her not to date.
Except Cora Countryman’s mother, Edith, intended Kanady for Cora, but stole from everyone in town and caught the 4:00 train out, instead. Edith is one of those characters you have to hate to love. I adore Cora’s thieving mother. I’ve been keeping her on the back burner, dropping hints, letting Cora stew about her loss and her predicament while her mother bides her time. Well, her time has come; Edith is back in The Orleans Lady (Book 5, out soon).
The Orleans Lady is a Mississippi riverboat populated by roues, gamblers, and travelers. It’s a small universe occupied by Cora for a limited number of days. Everyone she meets is part of the mystery. So, it’s important to distinguish each character, how they move, how they look, whom they love, what they love, why they love — OMG! Even for a walk on part. Because each one is part of the warp of the story’s fabric, like the best brocade, they enrich the riverboat.
How do characters come to be? If the plot is solid, the second bananas arise. But the series’ main characters must be carefully hand-fed to remain true to themselves. Kanady could no more be Doc Shaw than Doc Shaw could be Josiah Randolph, all of whom hold Cora dear. Each one has become integral to Wanee: the newspaperman, the young doctor, and Cora’s original boarder, now sheriff. They provide specific spice, skills, truths and knowledge to the stories, and they have all grown, changed, and yet retain their core.
And so, the plot feeds the characters, and carefully drawn, carefully nurtured characters feed the plot. In fact, in a series, the characters’ nature can suggest a story. I am currently happily setting the Women’s Temperance Union plunk down in the middle of Wanee, with its bars and growing immigrant population.
If you’ve read the Wanee mysteries, anticipate how each of the men, Sebastian Kanady, Doc Shaw, and Josiah Randolph, will react to what is bound to transpire. Then, throw in Cora, the protagonist, the Methodist, the dreamer, adventurer and amateur sleuth. See, that’s how it works.
And, yes, the process of building, sustaining and nurturing characters is very, very circular and involves lots and lots of notes.
When I first set out to write about Jeri Howard, the protagonist of the Jeri Howard series, I pictured how she looked. I thought about the clothes she wears and knew from the outset that she likes sensible, comfortable low-heeled shoes. And cats.
But there’s more to creating and developing a character than appearance. I want my characters to be as real as possible, with all the nuances and foibles of real people.
Every character, whether protagonist or secondary, needs a back story. Who was Jeri before that first book?
She’s in her thirties and divorced after a brief marriage. She has a younger brother. Their father is a history professor at a Bay Area university. Their mother is a chef and restaurant owner who lives in her hometown of Monterey. Jeri was upset at her parents’ divorce and blames her mother.
Jeri majored in history at the University of California in Berkeley, but she didn’t want to teach. Instead, she worked as a paralegal. Then she met Errol Seville, a private investigator, who persuaded her to work for him and get her PI license. When Errol retired, Jeri set out on her own.
That’s where Jeri is in the first novel, Kindred Crimes. When one is writing a series, there’s also the story going forward. With fourteen books in the series and another in the works, Jeri has experienced a lot—and changed a lot. She’s had a series of relationships with men. She’s not mad at her mother anymore. Her father has retired and taken up birding, something Jeri enjoys doing with him. And she’s called a truce in her prickly relationship with her ex-husband. After all, he’s a police detective. If there’s anything a private eye needs, it’s a contact in the local police department.
Relationships with other characters in the plot certainly drive the changes and growth in the main character. In Kindred Crimes, I mention that Jeri doesn’t get along with her mother. I couldn’t just let that lie there. Queue up the fourth Jeri book, Don’t Turn Your Back on the Ocean. What better way to bring things to a boil than to send Jeri to Monterey to visit her mother. Imagine how that turned out. Words were exchanged and Jeri went to stay with friends in nearby Carmel.
From a writer’s standpoint, I also enjoy expanding the role of secondary characters. Those friends in Carmel? They are retired PI—and Jeri’s mentor—Errol Seville and his wife Minna. And their disagreeable cat, Stinkpot. Writing about them was great fun. And Minna supplied some needed information for solving a case. Errol and Minna went on to appear in their very own short story, “Scam and Eggs.”
Sometimes secondary characters branch out. I call it cross-pollination. For example, in Witness to Evil, Jeri is in France, where through happenstance, she meets a professor named Lindsay Page, who teaches at California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo. Later in the book, Jeri follows a lead to SLO and visits Lindsay. Eventually Lindsay wound up as the protagonist of her own book, What You Wish For.
Later, I wrote a novella called But Not Forgotten, featuring a protagonist named Maggie Constable, a retired newspaper reporter. I like the character a lot, so I gave her a role in the most recent Jeri Howard novel, The Things We Keep. And stand by, Maggie will get a book of her own someday.
I have another series character, Jill McLeod. She’s the protagonist of the Jill McLeod California Zephyr series, set in the early 1950s. In the first book, Death Rides the Zephyr, readers learn that Jill was engaged to be married, but her fiancé died in the Korean War. Now, in her twenties, she works as a Zephyrette (a train hostess) on the California Zephyr, riding the rails between the Bay Area and Chicago several times a month. Unmarried, she lives at home with her parents and two younger siblings.
I’ve had fun with the secondary characters in these books, too. Take Mrs. Grace Tidsdale, who appears in the first book, and several others. With a name like that, she sounds as though she should be a proper lady. But Tidsy, as she prefers to be called, is anything but. She shows up on the train platform in the first book, dressed in bright red, her favorite color, and looking for all the world like she’s had too much to drink. And it’s morning! Tidsy’s back story includes working for the government during World War II, and I know she’ll wind up in her own book one of these days.