CREATING CHARACTERS

I’m almost finished with the ninth book in my Catherine Jewell Mystery Series. It’s my February book, “Red Roses for Valentine’s Day,” and soon I’ll be planning my tenth book that will take place in March. In my last book I’d had the ideas and plot in my mind for some time, but I still needed new characters. Since I write a series taking place in a small town, many former characters will return, but I need new ones, too.

 Soon I’ll start making up biographies for those new characters. How big a part they play determines how long his or her biography will be. The murderer needs a biography, too.  I need to know what drives that person to commit murder. I don’t write thrillers with psychopaths. My murderer is often, although not always, a normal, even a nice person, but something drives him or her to murder. It might be the victim standing in the way of something he or she desires, or  feels threatened in some way by the victim. Even with only one murderer per book, I do need to bring in new characters to populate my town of Portage Falls, similar to the Cabot Cove in the series Murder She Wrote. I’ve already killed off seven plus eliminated the murderers as they populate the state’s prisons.  

My brother at one of our sibling evenings.

I’ve based a few characters on people I know although never the murderer. A character I love, Ed, is based on my late brother, Jerry. Ed looks like my brother, is the avid gardener and an intelligent well-read person. But they diverge in other areas, especially in their wives.

My sister-in-law is a delightful person nothing like Ed’s wife, although after she read my first book she kept insisting she was. She has a delightful sense of humor.

Catherine, my protagonist, shares the same name as my youngest sister, and like my sister she's a botanist and a  blonde. Other than that their only comparison is being smart, curious and nice.

The first thing she asked after my son died,
in my arms  was how many breaths he took.

Millie is a cook at Elmwood Gardens, the large public gardens important in my series. She’s based on my mother-in-law, now deceased. Millie is extremely nosy and often asks inappropriate questions. She loves gossip and because of this she often unknowingly gives Catherine and the reader clues or red herrings.

Another character is based on a teacher I knew combined with a woman I didn’t know personally, but lived close to where I taught who was crazy about squirrels and put out signs warning people to drive carefully because of squirrels. This character became a kindergarten teacher who loved squirrels, but looked like the teacher I described even though she didn’t teach kindergarten. I gave her the name of “Polly Popcorn,” who had changed her name to go along with teaching kindergarten. Another character my readers like.

Grace is an amazing person. I'm really impressed by her.

A character I added recently is a woman in her nineties named Grace Meadows. I not only kept

her name, with her permission, I moved her, her house and greenhouse to Portage Falls. I met her over a year ago when a friend of my sister’s took us to meet her. She’s an avid reader of mysteries and keeps a three-ring binder with the name of each mystery author on a page and lists each book and a brief synopsis of the book. I’ve been sending her my books since I’ve met her and once she reads them she donates them to the library. I’ve visited her several more times and plan on going again once her garden is in bloom.

Other characters are mostly created from my imagination with sometimes a quirk or a certain look of someone I know or maybe from a conversation I’ve overheard in a restaurant or someplace else between two strangers. Also, the human interest stories in the newspaper or magazines are a good source of characters. So are obituaries.  In Twinsburg, Ohio, there is a yearly gathering of twins. One of the awards given is for the oldest pair of twins. So in my third book, I have elderly twins, a brother and sister, who constantly bicker.

Names are easy. I pluck them from the newspaper, books, magazines or people I know – a first name here, a last name there.  Once I had my cousin and her husband visiting a workshop at Elmwood Gardens where Catherine works. Another time I gave a character the last name of a woman in one of my book club. One of the members insisted on having her name in one of my books. She didn’t care if she was a victim or the murderer. When she read the book she was not pleased. She said, “You not only made me black, you made me old.” A friend of mine also in the book club thought that was funny. It didn’t matter to this woman the character I gave her name to is delightful as is the character’s sister. A lot of readers like them. So do I.

Creating characters is fun. It’s one of my favorite aspects of writing. Maybe it’s because I’m curious about people. I want to know more about them. What’s their story? What makes them who they are? Of course, there are people I meet I don’t care to know better.  That doesn’t mean

I can’t use what attributes I don’t like in a character.  A book needs well rounded characters, those who are a mixture of positive and negative elements with the characters we like best usually leaning more towards positive. But unlike the old-time westerns, no one today wears a white hat signifying they’re a good guy or a black hat signifying they’re the evil-doer. And neither should our characters although I have to admit sometimes I do make the villain not such a nice person, but I usually add some other characters that are equally unpleasant characters.

Another thing I like about creating characters I use characters to bring social issues into my books. I have a young man with Down’s syndrome, an autistic man, a couple who are gay, and all are characters judged favorably by my readers. I’ve brought in prejudice, spousal abuse, and other issues. It’s my way of not only writing a book that people will hopefully enjoy, but also maybe making a difference in other ways. I recently read that readers tend to be more tolerant of others.

If you are a writer, how do you create your characters?

If you’re not a writer, what kind of characters would you like to create?