Character Building

This is from the blog Lying for a Living, published by one of my favorite up and coming crime novelists, Meg Gardiner. She has a humorous matter of fact no-nonsense approach on many subjects. On these posts she describes Character Building she did for her newest book, The Dirty Secrets Club and how she did it without a ‘so-called’ muse

Some writers claim they don’t construct their stories. Instead, they say, when they sit down at the keyboard the characters “just take over.” These writers describe this occurence with whimsical amazement at the way their creations spill themselves gloriously onto the page.

I don’t believe it. If writers truly think their characters seize control of the story, they’re either playing with a ouija board, off their meds, or listening to so much Carrie Underwood that they’ve thrown their hands in the air, crying for somebody to take the wheel. Gosh, it wasn’t me… this book is just a transcription of THE VOICES INSIDE MY HEAD.

Maybe I’m just a sour, conventional person whose muse refuses to come out to play. But I have to build characters the pedestrian way, by observing human nature and figuring out the needs of the story. Boo. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun.

Take a character in my next book, The Dirty Secrets Club. We’ll call her Susan Daly. That’s because Susan Daly of Toronto won a contest on my blog and earned the chance to be immortalized in the novel. (Or mortalized, as the case may be. It’s a thriller.) Who would the fictional Susan be?

The heroine, Jo Beckett, is a forensic psychiatrist. So I wanted her to do some forensic headshrinking, before the murder and mayhem got rolling full speed. Jo consults for the police department but is also on call with a medical crisis team, so I had the police call her to the airport to deal with a passenger who barricades herself inside a jetliner. Jo must determine whether the woman is dangerous, or should be involuntarily committed. Jo boards the plane, remarking, “You never knew what you were going to get in these situations. Catatonia. Religious mania. A bad drug trip. Drunkenness, or a violent psychotic episode. A guy trying to detonate his shoes.”

What she got was a woman in a magenta crop-top and bright orange stretch pants, snarling at the police like a wild dog.

Susan, no – stop, don’t pull your hair out. I decided the snarler would not be named Susan Daly. You won the contest. Having your character flush her passport before crawling around a 747 dressed as jack o’ lantern would have been unfair.

And in the end, the murder and mayhem needed to roll. I cut the entire scene.

So who did Susan Daly become? I’ll save that for part two of this post.