CREATING OUR PROTAGONIST

I recently finished Louise Penny’s eighth and latest book, How the Light Gets In, and I felt frustrated because I had no one to discuss the ending with. I love Penny’s books and each one is better than the last, but maybe it’s because not only her protagonist, but also the characters with all their idiosyncrasies seem real enough to become my friends. So I lay awake thinking about the ending and considered calling my brother-in-law in Tacoma since he’d already read it and enjoyed it, too. But even with the three hour time difference, it was still too late to call him. A few days later my Tacoma sister and I did have an online chat about the ending and where Louise Penny would go with her next book.

Then I got to thinking about her main character, Armand Gamache, and remembered meeting him the first year Louise Penny came to Malice Domestic with her first book, Still Life, What? How could I meet a fictitious character? Well, I did sort of because Louise Penny and her husband were at my table for the beginning of Malice-go-round. She had three minutes to talk about her book and told us about Armand Gamache and how he was based on her husband, not that her husband was Chief Inspector of Quebec’s Surete, but because Gamache had all her husband’s characteristics. The expression on his face as Penny talked about her book was full of pride and love for his wife. Even in the years that followed at other Malice’s I could see the love between the two of them, just like that of Armand and Reine-Marie Gamache. It’s in their expressions and body language.

 

Although Still Life wasn’t nominated for an Agatha that year, it won numerous other awards, and five of her subsequent books won an Agatha, something no other author has done, and her book The Beautiful Mystery debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list. Because I believe in starting a series at the beginning, I picked Still Life for both of my book clubs and reread them several years apart. I enjoyed it just as much the third time and maybe more because I found clues to the murderer I hadn’t noticed in the first read as well as little things that would turn up in future books.

So next I thought about my main character Catherine Jewell. A lot of people have asked if I based her on someone I knew or if she were me. She’s not really either one totally, but a mixture. When one of my sisters and I collaborated on The Blue Rose, which for years was called Murder at Elmwood Gardens, we decided on a gardening theme since our whole family of six siblings were gardeners. Our youngest sister, Catherine, is a botanist so we gave the protagonist her name and made her a botanist. My sister wanted our Catherine to be in her twenties and a very ambitious person who would expand her horizons into creating gardening businesses and a show on TV or the radio. Within a month I had taken over the writing because we lived too far apart to get together very often, and she still had kids living at home. I didn’t. But I couldn’t get into the head of an ambitious twenty something year old woman, so I aged her to forty. I also gave her a past life before coming to the little town of Portage Falls that was somewhat similar to mine. Catherine lost her husband and only child in an accident ten years before. Because my oldest son had died, I could write realistically about her loss. I am not a botanist, but I can contact my sister for anything I want to know that I can’t find in the many gardening books I have. Although Catherine has a few quirks or beliefs that are mine, for the most part she is a totally fictitious character sprung from my imagination.

I wonder how many other authors, especially of series, can write a protagonist without making them at least a little bit like themselves or like someone they know well even if they switch genders.

How much of your main character is like you?

As a reader, what main character resonates most with who you are?