Characters

 by Donis Casey

I greatly enjoyed Sybil's entry yesterday about categories. I've been working on a new book, possibly a new series, which started out to be a straight mystery. But as the story develops, I seem to be crossing genres. It's turning out to be much more of a fish-out-of-water story. My protagonist wants to figure out who killed her mother, but she has to go to a foreign country and meet members of a family she didn't know she had in order to do it. She keeps leading me down paths I hadn't planned on. Because no matter what I originally intended, the characters make the final determination about what kind of a novel I'm writing.

A novel is a story about someone. In a mystery, it’s the sleuth, a romance the lovers, in a thriller, it’s the guy in trouble. Barbara Kingsolver said, ”A novel works its magic by putting a reader inside another person’s life.” She also said, the difference between non-fiction (such as news reporting) and a novel is that if you read a non-fictional account of a plane crash, you find out the facts about the crash. If you read a novel about a plane crash, you find out what it’s like to be in a plane crash.

So what we as authors want to do is create a world, and invite the reader to come in and stay awhile. In order to get her to want to spend time in our world, we need to populate it with characters whom the reader is interested in. She wants to know what is going to happen to these people—for the good to be rewarded and the evil to get their just comeuppance. If we do our jobs right, the reader doesn’t just want to know, she’s desperate to know. And in order to make the reader care about our characters and want to know what is going to happen to them, we have to make them real to her. The characters are more important than the plot. You might not remember who done it, but you will remember the characters.

So how do you get to know the people you want to write about. I think in the same way you get to know a person in real life. You watch what they do, you listen to them speak. They reveal themselves to you over time. Perhaps the attitudes of other people toward someone tells you something about both of them. Before you even start writing about someone, you’d better know all about him—who he is, where he came from, what he wants, why he is like he is. All of this affects the way he speaks, the way he presents himself.

The more you write about a character, the more she will show you things about herself that you didn’t know when you first thought her up.

Random Thoughts on Writing

I (Donis) have been doing my best to write over the past months - though it's hard to concentrate these days. I'd plead that I've had writer's block, but I've thought for years that “Writer’s block” is not really a thing. If you’re stuck, put something down, some reminder, or thought, a place-filler, or just a blank. Recently I read about an author who writes the word “bagel” when he can’t think of anything else. This allows him to keep moving. He can always go back and find the perfect term later. Believe me, even Shakespeare’s first draft looked like the dog’s dinner.  I live by this philosophy, especially lately, since I am not only not bringing my A game when I sit down to write, I’m not even up to my W game. But you must plug on. Later, after you have something to work with, you rewrite, and then you go back and do it again. And again. I think that most authors are never really satisfied with what they’ve created.  As for me, I’ll tinker with a book until I absolutely have to turn it in for the last time. Years after the book is published, I’ll find myself coming up with fresh ideas for a scene and wishing I could go back and work on it some more.

I once read an essay that postulated that a person’s thinking patterns might be formed by the geography of the place he grew up. I don’t know if that is true. However, I have observed that people are happier in some places than others, possibly due to where they were reared. My husband was raised on the wide-open Great Plains, and becomes claustrophobic in heavily wooded country. A friend from the Ozark Mountains once told me that she loves the woods. She feels protected and secure in wooded country, and exposed and vulnerable on a treeless plain. Many a city-raised person is disoriented in the wilderness, and vice-versa for someone who grew up in the country. It’s what you’re familiar with, I suppose. I read a piece in the newspaper several years ago about an unusually long period of sunshine in Iceland, which is normally has cloud cover for some 300 days a year. An interviewee said that the clear sky was nice at first, but after a week, she was beginning to feel nervous and unhappy. I’m sure there is a story idea lurking in there somewhere.

If I’m going to spend two or three days of my life reading a novel, I would prefer to like at least some of the characters. I try not to spend too much time with real-world people I dislike, after all. I once read a well-known book by a Very Famous Author and found the mystery quite interesting and the writing excellent.Very Famous Author really knew how to invoke a setting and construct a plot. The characters were  well drawn, but they were  all so unpleasant that even though I really wanted  to know how the story turned out, I had trouble finishing the book. I finally skimmed through just enough to get the gist and then read the end. I take a lesson from this experience and try to create characters who the readers will enjoy spending time with. Not to say that all the characters should be nice. Where’s the fun in that? I  do enjoy seeing evil people get their comeuppance.

Stress

Henry James said that plot is characters under stress.

When I began working on my second Geneva Chase novel, Darkness Lane, I sent the first hundred pages to my editor at Poisoned Pen Press. In it, Geneva is sober, cooking meals for her and Caroline (Geneva’s ward) in their warm, cozy kitchen, and she’s sworn off married men.

In the first chapter, I wrote about an abused woman who waits until her drunken husband has fallen asleep and then covers him with gasoline and lights a match. By the time the police arrive, the fire department is vainly trying to put out the blaze and the husband is long past screaming.

The cops find the woman standing on the curb with a plastic cup filled with Merlot. She looks at the officers and says, “I’m just toasting my husband.”

A page later, we find that a fifteen-year-old high school girl has gone missing. She happens to be Caroline’s best friend.

A good start? I thought so.

My editor, in her diplomatic but honest way, sent back a critique essentially saying that she could see how I was putting the puzzle pieces in place, but Geneva, my protagonist, was too suburban.

Oh my, God, I’d made her boring!

My editor went on to say, she hoped that the part of the abused woman torching her husband wasn’t being used as a ‘billboard’, a ruse to bring the reader into the story but once you’ve past it, no longer is part of the narrative.

Oh my, God. It was!

Finally, my editor said that in the first hundred pages…NOTHING HAPPENS!

Oh, my God. She’s right!

Two weeks later, I’d rewritten that first hundred pages. After review, my editor came back and told me that the first hundred pages are dark and it feels like everything is right on the edge of disaster. Keep writing.

Whew!

I put the characters under stress. I made the abused woman a secondary plot line, something that would merge with the disappearance of the high school girl. I brought in two characters from an earlier book I’d written but was never published, bad guys—really bad guys.

Geneva had to have it coming from all sides. Teenage Caroline became a pain in the ass. The publisher of the failing newspaper where Geneva is working is threatening to sell the publication to a media conglomerate, screwing his employees into the ground. A teacher at Caroline’s school disappears at the same time the high school student has gone missing. Geneva discovers the body of the student’s father, brutally murdered.

Geneva starts drinking again.

Characters under stress.

Australian writer, Ian Irvine said, “Conflict forces characters to act in ways that reveal who they are – and nothing tells us more about characters than how they deal with their troubles.”

He goes on to say, “Stories are about adversity. Happiness can be the ending of the story, but it can’t be the story itself. Why not? Because happy characters don’t want to change. Happiness doesn’t force the characters to act and thus reveal themselves and, if the characters are having a good time, the reader is not.”

Plus, stress and conflict create plot twists. When I write, at some point, the characters take on their own lives. I’m along for the ride. They seem to create their own dialogue, move through a scene without my guidance. And just like real life, things happen that I didn’t see coming. Some of my best plot twists just seem to have happened on their own.

Crazy? You bet. But aren’t all writers a little nuts?

And because your characters are under stress, it can feel uncomfortable to write the scene. It’s painful, not because it’s bad prose, but because your characters are struggling with the obstacles that YOU’VE given them. They’re your characters. You created them. You’re making them suffer.

Overcoming dire obstacles under stress is what draws the reader into your story, advances your plot, and makes your characters more sympathetic.

Have a great week and I hope to see you at either/or the Poisoned Pen Press Mystery Conference in Phoenix over Labor Day weekend and/or at Bouchercon, September 6-9 in St. Petersburg, FL.

Can fiction save the world?

As the previous posters have said, this has been quite the week. Indeed, quite the year. Brexit, Paris and Calais, Trump... Not to mention the daily tragedies of frantic refugees risking everything to reach Europe's shores. As a Canadian, I have been watching the recent drama of conflict, accusations, and counter-accusations from afar, worrying about all the anger and confusion and fear. As I listen to the bitterness and disbelief on both sides ("How could they?" from the left, and "Sore losers" from the right), I am reminded of a Beatles song: What the world needs now is love, love, love.

Or more accurately, empathy. Because there is precious little of it around right now. People are dividing themselves into us and them. They are crossing their arms, thrusting out their chins, and refusing to listen. Refusing to hear. Worse, they are lashing out, cruelly and vindictively.

How are we ever supposed to reach across the divide if we stand on either shore, hurling insults without ever venturing out onto the bridge?

The Cambridge English Dictionary defines empathy as "the ability to share someone else's feelings and experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation". In the majority of people, empathy develops naturally as we grow up, but psychology had focussed a lot of research on what factors influence and strengthen its development. If you're interested, here is one quick summary of their findings.

Empathy increases as we grow older, so that most of us adults are pretty good at reading minds. You can test this concept, and your own skill, by taking this short quiz on reading the mind in the eyes. But there is always room for improvement, and I'd say from the increasingly intolerant behaviour being displayed, we all have serious work to do. Here's a short article on ways even adults can increase their empathy. Not surprisingly, really listening to others and getting to know people different from yourself top the list.

BUT... There is another way that even the most brick-headed person can develop more empathy, and that's where we writers come in. Empathy is all about walking in another person's shoes, about being able to step out of your own skin (in your imagination) and into another's. Research has shown that groups of people vary in their level of empathy and in who they feel empathy for. It's easier to empathize with people who are similar to you than with people who are extremely different (from another culture, another country, even another political viewpoint). Intriguing research is also emerging about the differences between conservatives and liberals, and between extremists and moderates of either stripe, about the difference between men and women, and between the ordinary joe and the very wealthy ... But these are all subjects for a different blog.

This blog is about writing, and one of the fascinating findings is that reading fiction increases empathy. Not only do people who read a lot of fiction score higher on empathy, but even reading a piece of fiction in a psychology lab will increase your empathic reaction in the moments afterwards! Check out a summary of findings here. Despite some faults with methodology, the studies confirm what we writers and readers of fiction intuitively know -- that walking in the shoes of the characters in the book, experiencing their struggles vicariously and trying to make sense of why they act as they do — enhances our understanding of people in the real world as well. Fiction has been called empathy's "flight simulator".

Extrapolating from this, I would guess that the greater the emphasis on character, on subtle differences and changes, and on complexities and layers of motivation, the more powerful the effect would be. That's where mystery fiction comes in. Research found that literary fiction had the greatest effect because of its focus on character, but not all crime fiction is created equal. Many (but not all) of the best-selling thriller variety pays scant attention to character, and many (again, not all) cosies intentionally downplay the pain of conflict. However, I suspect that mystery fiction that reveals complex character, conflicting motive, and blurred boundaries of good and bad will foster empathy better than shoot-'em-up, "good vs. evil" action stories.

So, crime writers, take heart! Writing books that explore the human condition and invite readers to walk in you characters' shoes and think "there but for the grace of God go I," may not make us rich and famous, but they can make a difference.

And readers, in this gift-buying season, consider giving the gift of fiction, and venture past the best-sellers to the back of the store to find those lesser-known books that tell tales of struggle and conflict and the wondrous highs and lows of being human. Tales that really transport you into the world of another. Read about people and situations different from your own. From the safety of your armchair, explore beyond your comfort zone.

Book by book, we can strengthen our understanding of each other and reach across the divides where at the moment all we see is "the other". Not "us".

Characters, Ideas, and Settings

The posts by my colleagues this week has been so thought-provoking, I had a hard time deciding what to blog about today. Characters who take over? Where ideas come from? Setting as character?

I have experienced that phenomenon of a character who refuses to do what he or she was intended to do. In my third Lizzie Stuart book, Old Murders, the character who was to have been the killer refused that assignment and insisted on having a subplot. In the fourth book, You Should Have Died on Monday, Lizzie's mother, Becca, made an appearance that threatened to upstage Lizzie, my first-person protagonist. Becca is still out there and now that I've returned to the series for a new book, I'm sure she will be making another appearance. I hate to have her ruin Lizzie's wedding, but I'm pretty sure she will show up during the honeymoon. And when she reappears, I will be torn. She is the most take-no-prisoners character I have ever created. A femme fatale who disrupts Lizzie's life, but shouldn't overshadow her.

The idea for my historical mystery came to me when I was thinking about 1939 and the events that symbolized the struggle in America between past and present, inequality and justice. In 1939, Marian Anderson performed at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, the New York World's Fair opened that summer, Billie Holiday performed "Strange Fruit," a song about lynching, at Cafe Society in NYC, and that December, Gone with the Wind premiered in Atlanta. This idea -- even more than most of my ideas -- has required a lot of thought to get to workable plot.

On the other hand, the idea for my sixth Lizzie Stuart book, now in progress, came to me as an image of a woman running out of her house toward her car. I wanted to try my hand at a flash story for the New England Crime Bake contest. It wasn't a great story -- I needed more words -- but I did discover where that woman was going. She drives up into the mountains to rescue her child, who is being held hostage by an old enemy. The story was pure noir. In my head it played out like a graphic novel. And my protagonist Lizzie Stuart was nowhere in sight.

But that dark, rainy night wouldn't go away. When I was ready to start my new book, the plot changed and the characters changed. But the book begins with Lizzie, driving home on a rainy night in Gallagher and coming upon a car by the side of the road. A woman is trying to change a tire. . .

The book begins there. But the next day, Lizzie and her fiance, John Quinn, fly off to Santa Fe to spend Thanksgiving with his family.

Lizzie has never met his family and wants to make a good impression. But now she is distracted by what is going on back in Gallagher. A woman is missing. Her car was found by the side of the road. . .

Since the murder mystery is back in Gallagher, I might have done some reading about Santa Fe and watched some YouTube videos. But my Thanksgiving gathering -- when Lizzie meets Quinn's family, all of whom have been mentioned in earlier books -- is important to readers who have been following the series. I'm curious about Quinn's family, too, and I want to do those scenes justice. Lizzie and Quinn will soon be on a plane back to Gallagher, Virginia, but I want the family gathering to ring true. So I'm going to Santa Fe for three days in November to find the neighborhood that Quinn's half-sister lives in and the street where her art gallery is located. I'm going to do the tour of the area that Lizzie will have when she goes there. I want the setting to have as much significance in the story as Gallagher.

I have one other idea that I'm playing with, but need to work out. I need to resolve a series arc from my two Hannah McCabe police procedural novels set in Albany. The two books, The Red Queen Dies and What the Fly Saw, are set in 2019 and 2020, respectively. My Lizzie Stuart series is set in the recent past. The year in the sixth book is 2004. But Lizzie is an alum of the University at Albany, School of Criminal Justice. I've been thinking of a cameo appearance by a professor in Gallagher, Virginia, who Detective McCabe contacts to ask a key question about the threat that she is facing in Albany, NY in 2020. Lizzie would be in her 50s, and I wonder what would be going on in her life and how she would be different in McCabe's alternate universe. Just playing with the idea. . .