Creating a Fictional Character

 

By Margaret S. Hamilton

Betty Birdsall is one of the first characters I created while populating the fictional college town of Jericho, Ohio. She is named for my mother, Betty, an active garden club volunteer. Slender and energetic, her gray curls crushed under a sun visor, my fictional Betty is usually found weeding the public display beds and watering the hanging flower baskets on Main Street. She drives a Prius station wagon loaded with gardening tools and yard bags.

 

Betty is a widowed schoolteacher who taught third grade for forty years. In addition to the mandated public-school curriculum, Ms. Birdsall took her students on nature walks every Friday. Her students and their children acknowledge they can still identify fifty kinds of tree leaves, native pollinators, and local wildflowers. Her classroom windowsills were lined with seedlings and forced tulip and hyacinth bulbs. On Earth Day, her class traveled to a local park to plant tree saplings.

 

Betty’s husband taught botany at the local college. They welcomed visitors to their woodland gardens next to the bird sanctuary. Betty still lives in the brick bungalow on the back college lane with Mabel, her feisty terrier mix.

 

Betty is kind and willing to share her gardening knowledge with novice gardeners, but she also has high standards. She doesn’t tolerate wanna be gardeners who purchase coneflowers and daisies in five-gallon pots, plant them in a new flower bed, and then announce that their garden is ready for the annual house and garden tour. Betty believes gardens should blend into the landscape, with perennials planted in a continuous bloom sequence, and winter interest bushes like hollies and red-twigged dogwoods providing a year-round dimension to the garden.

 

She supports and adheres to current Ohio law, allowing six home-grown marijuana plants per adult in a household, grown inside or out of sight from the street. Betty has known many chronic pain patients who have benefited from marijuana and makes their locally sourced consumption possible.

 

In my recently published story, “With a Little Help From Her Friends,” Betty readies her own gardens for the local House and Garden Tour while supervising preparations for the other featured gardens. Deer and rabbits have feasted on the daylilies and hostas. Snapping turtles are on the move, laying eggs in the nearby green space. And there’s Hugo, a six-foot black rat snake hunting for moles, chipmunks, and mice.

 

Assisted by her chemistry professor neighbor, Betty identifies the culprit responsible for killing the annuals in public gardens around town. Hugo and his slithery friends ensure that the perp doesn’t escape before the police arrive.

 

Mystery Short Story: With A Little Help From Her Friends | Kings River Life Magazine

 

Writers and readers, have you created characters based on a real person or certain characteristics of a real person?

 

Margaret S. Hamilton’s debut amateur sleuth mystery, What the Artist Left Behind, is on submission.

 

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