I Was Just Wondering

by Louis Willis

I’ve been wondering about character creation. Not so much how you fictionists, or is it fictioneers (I’m not sure of the difference but that is a subject for another post), create characters, but I was just wondering how you manage to stay sane while doing so. Specifically, how you give each character a personality that distinguishes him or her from other characters, even minor ones.

Actors take what the playwright or screen writer has written and make the character their own, becoming the character. You fictionists, on the other hand, have to create several characters in one story, sometimes in paragraph or even one sentence. I was just wondering if you become each character in order to create him or her, to give them personalities, including the various emotions each must have to be believable. 

I began thinking about how fictionists create characters while reading A Free Man of Color by Barbara Hambly in which she, a white writer, created the black male amateur detective Benjamin January. I decided to write a post about creating characters after reading the short story “Pansy Place” by Dan Warthman (AHMM January-February 2012) that Rob mentions in his January 16 post. The protagonist, Jones, is white and Akin, the young man who goes along with him to confront the bad guys, is black. He reminds Jones of himself when he was young--a tough, no nonsense kind of guy. In addition, Warthman created a believable damsel in distress, L’Vonte, Jones’s cleaning lady, and Konnie Kondrasin who was Jones’s agent when he was taking on dangerous jobs. In all, including the three bad guys and L’Vonte’s boyfriend, there are eight characters he has to give different personalities with different emotions, though he gives the bad guys a collective personality.

In these two examples, the characters are of different races. Even when you create characters of the same race but different gender, you may have to be a woman and a man in the same story, and that has to do something to your mind. In the delightful story “Acting on A Tip” (EQMM July 2012), which Rob also mentions, the female author, Barbara Arno Modrack, creates Marty, a very believable male protagonist. He is an ex-alcoholic, ex-journalist who has moved with his long suffering wife Jenny and their youngest son to a small town where he helps catch a serial killer. Modrack has to first think like a man (assuming men and women think differently), switch bodies and be his wife, switch again, and be the teenage son, and finally switch and be the killer. She doesn’t give us the interior thinking of each character. We see the action from Marty’s perspective, but certainly, Modrack had to give each character a little personality to make them, even the minor characters, convincing.

In creating characters, you base some on relatives, some on friends, and even some on strangers, but mostly they come from your imagination. No matter, you still must give them different personalities with the accompanying emotions, and creating those various emotions, my friends, must take a toll on your minds, doesn’t it?

I was just wondering how you do it and still maintain your sanity.

To all of you a big

Debut Novelist Alert

Since I began this twisting and turning journey in becoming a writer, I have had opportunity to get to know some exceptional authors. Anita Grace Howard is one of them. Her debut novel, Splintered, is available as of January 1st and should be one of the first books you buy this year.

This book is as exceptional as its author in more ways than one. An author's first published book is rarely a hardcover version, but this one is -- it rarely has such compelling cover art, but this one does -- it rarely packs such a punch to deserve to hit the top of the best-seller list, but I'm going out on a limb and predicting: This one will! (In fact, I will go even further and say this will be the new Hunger Games, Twilight, Harry Potter kind of book.

The premise all but forces a reader to want to dive into this book. The protagonist, Alyssa, hears whispers of bugs and flowers. These are the things her mother had experienced and due to them had been placed into a mental facility. Alyssa's family stories relate a perpetuating curse via her ancestor, Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Alyssa's own adventures prove Wonderland is terrifying.

The story of Anita being wooed by her agent who actually flew to our small city to meet the author and sign her as a client is unheard of, but then, so is this book. It started winning praises about as fast as it could be read by those in the publishing world.

Of all the writers I've met, Anita is probably the most sincere nice person out there in the publishing world. She deserves everything she is getting with this book's obvious success. It doesn't hurt that she's beautiful, too.


Now that I've shared this wonderful news author and her legacy about to explode, let me assure you, there are plenty of new, struggling writers out there worthy of our time to discover and enjoy. I often ask book store managers who has a debut novel on the stands and they are always happy to lead me to them. When I worked as a book reviewer, I saw many good books by authors who would probably get "lost" simply because they are sandwiched in between established authors with a known sales marketability  and celebrity books that are bought because their name and/or image is already a brand the public recognizes. I ask that you seek those that didn't get as much push from their publisher due to advertising budgets being slashed for new authors.

As the economy suffers, it's been proven people look for entertainment in which to escape the woes of the world. As I was watching Ken Burns' "The Dust Bowl," I kept remembering my grandparents saying, "We went to the movies every week and read, read, read. It was all we could do."

I'm suggesting we delve into books, sharing the good ones with each other, especially those of new-to-us authors. Right now, it may be all we can do to keep our sanity. Let's escape together into another world. Begin the New Year by reading Splintered and be sure and let me know what you think.