Perils of the Writer: Characters Out Of Control

When other writers talk about characters "getting away from them" or "out of their control", I have to confess, I'm at a bit of a loss to understand that.  I'm not saying that in a "I'm right, they're wrong" sort of way-- it's just a difference in process.

For example, I write with a well-established outline, so my major character's goals, intentions and actions are largely worked out in the outline phase.  In the drafting phase, none of them are going to "surprise" me, nor do I have a conflict between What The Plot Needs and What The Character Needs, because I've already taken that into account.   If one is more of a pantser, I can see how the process of pantsing a first draft can create these Plot vs. Character conflicts, where what a character needs to do is at odds with what you, the writer, need them to do for the plot.

However, notice I say "major characters".   This is a crucial distinction, because it's the minor characters where those surprises and discoveries can come into play, mostly because they aren't even taken into account when the outline is written.

Take, for an example from Thorn of Dentonhill, the character of Hetzer.  Hetzer initially existed solely because Colin needed someone to talk to in a scene.  I establish that Colin is a street captain in the Rose Street Princes, so I need someone for Colin to be a captain of.  Hetzer was never in the outline.  Nor were Jutie or Tooser, the other Princes in Colin's crew.  So, when I reached the point in the story where Colin makes a crucial decision and acts upon it... Hetzer is by his side.  Hetzer got elevated to being a crucial part of the story-- even being the POV character for a couple scenes-- because it made perfect sense in the moment.  He stepped up in the story because that was exactly what Hetzer would do.

Now, I'm not going to act like this was some sort of out-of-my-hands divined-from-above thing.  This was a realization I made when writing the scene, and that realization made it clear how the details of the rest of the story played out.  I could have ignored that realization, made a different choice.  I know my first choices aren't always the best.*  Heck, a major thing that became a crucial character element for Minox in A Murder of Mages wasn't even in the rough draft.

My point is this: you know who your characters are.  You know what they need and want, and what choices they'll make because of that.  How that manifests in your skull during the process.... that's not for me to say.

What IS for me to say is that I'll be signing at the Penguin booth at New York ComicCon at 4pm on Sunday.  That is LITERALLY the final hour of the con, so if you're there and you still have strength to shuffle on over to the booth, come say hi.  ALSO, as I said before, there's a multi-author Post-NYCC Event in the Penguin Random House offices on Monday at 11am, and if you can come, you totally should, because they're giving away free books, and there are many authors there who are much cooler than me.

---

*- Back in my theatre days, my usual costume/set/art director had a mantra: "Your first three ideas are wrong."  A bit pessimistic, but it highlights a key point of it being okay to work through bad ideas to get to the good ones.

While Linda's Away...

Linda's off waging war against...things I can't mention or she'll have to kill me.

In the absence of her sagacity, we present a video lecture on character introduction, development, and believable change by Hollywood greats.

Writing Characters For Film & Television from the Film Courage Screenwriting Series

(search YouTube for that phrase)

Oh The Aggro: When Characters Go Off Script

How do I feel when my characters go off script?

I'm pretty sure it's every Pantser's neener-neener on Plotters. I can hear their sniggering as the scene ends. The outline has us storming the castle, yet the characters decided to stowaway on an alien ship. They've jumped timelines, quadrants, and genres.

And yes, sometimes it really is that drastic a change. When a character fully comes alive on the page, the story I thought I was writing can turn out to be a wholly different beast.

Let me tell you, dear readers, I am one of those folks who believes spontaneity is fine...

...as long as it's planned.

For the most part, however, I roll with it. Whatever the characters are up to, I indulge.  For a time. As long as they still have the same GMC and can get themselves to the pre-arranged Grand Climax, I will revise the outline and keep going in the direction the characters have determined.

On the other hand, if those naughty little boys and girls are on a tangent, then I am ever the cruel mistress who will drag their asses back to the scene prior to their unfortunate display of free will and force them down the path I had originally plotted.

Mother knows best, after all.

What about personalities that develop contrary to how I envisioned them? This, this happens all the time. They adopt traits and make decisions that completely change their arc. Hell, they occasionally have the gall to inform me that two or three distinct characters I'd originally planned are actually facets of one character. Protagonist down to tertiary character, their growth from concept into multi-faceted person is what keeps the magic of story-writing intact for this Plotter. I typically have three to five Big Moments that I need the characters to hit over the course of the story. As long as they get there, I delight in the surprise of how they get to the moments and how they are changed by the moments.

So, all in all, when characters develop minds of their own, the Control Freak in me is initially annoyed, but the Creative in me is utterly delighted. And when it comes to writing a novel, creative satisfaction is paramount.

Monsters from Beyond the Veil

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Dark Secrets

by Rachel Caine

Giveaway ends October 31, 2015.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Last week saw the release of DARK SECRETS: A PARANORMAL NOIR ANTHOLOGY. What - you didn't know "paranormal noir" was a thing?

IT IS NOW!

I finally got a chance to read the stories by my sister contributors and it's really a cool collection of stories. We really had only those two elements in common - something paranormal and noir shading - but the overall feel is remarkably consistent. At any rate, there's a Goodreads giveaway going on for it, if you'd like to win a copy. But it's only .99 cents, so quite the bargain if you choose to buy.

Amazon 

Kindle 

Barnes & Noble 

Nook 

All Romance

 Google Play 

iBooks 

Kobo

The Book Depository

Last week, we played a fun game in the Bordello, where I started a story and each author added onto it. It spiraled pretty wildly out of control - and wound its way through several genres and multiple sub-genres. It's worth reading the whole thread, just to see how each author spun the voice and action.

One thing I found interesting was that I started with two characters - one male, one female - and by the end there was a much larger cast, but still only one named female. Inherent bias? Or is it characters taking off on their own?

That's the topic for this week: Characters with a mind of their own.

I remember the first time I heard about this phenomenon. My mom told me about an interview she read with Madeleine L'Engle about writing The Arm of the Starfish. The story hinges around a chance meeting and L'Engle said that this character turned up and surprised her. She had no idea that this person would be in the story, but the character walked onto the page and took over.

I don't know why she told me that, if she was making some point, but it startled me - and frankly creeped me out a bit. I was probably around ten and the idea that a character could introduce themselves to an author's story was like being told that ghosts and monsters are real. It implied that intelligences not our own can cross over some barrier and infiltrate our minds.

Knowing that changed the way I viewed the world.

I'm more at peace with the notion as an adult. Not that I became more practical and realize my youthful idea was wrong Quite the opposite. This absolutely happens to me all the time as a writer. The characters tell me who they are. They come from somewhere outside myself. I've learned not to fight it, as that only leads to misery.

Sometimes I think that, just once, I'd love to write the book I thought I was going to write, but I'd also like to be 5'10" and 120 pounds - and that ain't gonna happen either.

Characters in Technicolor

How on earth do you write fresh, vivid characters who haunt readers long after a book is finished? Especially when most of us are telling our own story over and over again from different perspectives (I seem to be all about finding a place to belong, for example.) I'd like to say I have a lock on vivid characters, but  I suspect it's a lifetime's work-in-progress. Here are a few of the tools in my box. Try them. See if they fit your hand.

1. Know why. Why is a character where they are at the beginning of your story? Not just, 'hey, I'm working this job because I need the money.' That's the first layer. Excavate. Why is the money important? 'I mean to pay my way to college.' Sure, but why? 'So I can get a much better, more meaningful job.' You know what I'm going to do here, right? Sing along with me. Why? What does meaningful job mean and why is it so vital? 'Because we lived in poverty my entire childhood with my father and mother working two, sometimes three menial jobs apiece. They were never there. We were never safe from being evicted and uprooted AGAIN. I will not live like that. Never. Money is safety and I want it any way I can get it.'  NOW we're getting somewhere. You know what this person believes. You know what this person's pain points are. You know exactly how and where conflict can come from, based on just a few questions.

Twisted as it is, rich characters come from a character's conscious or unconscious pain. Welcome to emotional/psychological archeology.

2. Hit 'em hard. Character arcs aren't supposed to be cakewalks. Can people change? Absolutely. We do it all the time. If we didn't, the species would have been snack-packs on the plains of Africa long, long ago. But that doesn't mean it's easy. That's why we have all the lovely motivational (or de-motivational) posters we do. You know. "When the pain of remaining the same is greater than the pain of change, we change." To that end, you have to gleefully stomp on their pain points time after time. Maybe the character above gets evicted? Or is denied entry to the college she's worked so hard to attend? if you know what's most important to your character (financial security for our character above) that is the thing that must be the lever that pries the character out of her old way of thinking/acting. Suppose she (or he) has to chose between True Love and The Big Score. Can't have both. Cue the angst. The character we know hasn't yet changed so she picks The Big Score, only to find that money may mean a swanky address and nice clothes, but it's lonely, cold, and unhappy. Oops. Suddenly that belief - money means security - is challenged. You have all the room in the world to decide what now. Does she go back to the lost love, begging for a second chance? Only to find that love married and living a happy, fulfilled life in a low-income housing project? Character has to process: How could they be happy? They have nothing except each other. Poor pathetic fools - man, I have everything I always wanted. Where's my happy??

Every 'ouch' resonates. Welcome to the business of forcing characters into choices that gut them - even when you're story is light and fluffy.

3. No win without sacrifice: When characters DO change - they meet their arc - somewhere along the line in that arc, someone or something dies. It can be literal death or metaphorical death, but something has to be given up. Our ambitious character is going to have to give up her view of her past - she might suddenly recall how much her parents adored one another and their kids. She might, slowly, come to give up her old belief that money means security - and by extension, happiness. Of course, having enough money to assure food and housing security absolutely impacts happiness, but once that's achieved, the character's needs shift. (Not because I'm being arbitrary here - it's the hierarchy of needs - once a baseline of security is established, humans rise up the pyramid of needs to be met.) In this story, you have a choice - if your character changes, she can give up her high powered job in favor of a fulfilling relationship and a job with a nonprofit - it doesn't pay a whole lot - but the work matters. Character fulfilled. If the character fails to make her changes, she watches all of her driven peers fall around her - they all five up their six figure jobs in favor of travel, or meaningful-to-them work, or relationships - and weirdly, they all seem so happy. Steeped in her unhappiness, but clinging to the assurance that if she just works harder, she'll get more money and THEN she'll be happy.

No win without sacrifice. If no win, the character IS the sacrifice.

Every character is an individual and no two will have the same answers to your 'why' questions. That, for me, is the starting point for unique characters. If I know the why behind them, I start hearing their voices. . . which may indicate a need for psychoactive medication. But hey. Writing's cheaper.

Keeping It Real - How to Write Vivid Characters

Surprise! GOING UNDER has been translated into Italian and is now SEXY GAMES over there. Don't you just love the cover? I want those shoes. Shouldn't I get to have them, as part of my contract?

This week at the Bordello, we're wrestling with a topic every writer fears - Character Cloning: How To Avoid Reusing the Voices, Mannerisms, and Bad Habits of Characters. At least, I hope every writer worries about this because falling into ruts like this can lead to a major decline in quality of the work. As a character-driven writer, I especially focus on making each character as unique as possible.

However, I'm not entirely sure how I do it.

I'm a very organic writer in many ways, and regarding characters most of all. My (perhaps overly simplistic) answer to how to avoid Character Cloning is to write characters as real people. But how do you do that?

Let me tell you a little story. I once took a directing class (as you do) and, for the final project, we staged one-act plays for real audiences over two nights. It was fascinating to listen in on conversations about the play I directed - because I was simply an invisible part of the crowd, people did not censor at all. What I learned was that at any point in the play where I had not been crystal clear on what was going on, what my two characters were thinking and feeling, the audience had been unclear. The actors simply relayed my ideas. The whole play became a kind of physical manifestation of my thoughts - both clear and muddy.

It's a kind of magic that I don't really understand. I just know it's true. And it works for characterization in books, too.

Jeffe's Tips for Keeping It Real

1. Know Their Offstage Lives - Characters should have lives that have been going on before they walk onto the page and after the walk off again. Even the most minor characters. You don't necessarily need to write this out, but you do need to know it. Some writers find it helpful to write all that out, but for me that's displacement activity and energy I could be using to write the actual book. Your mileage may vary. However you get to it, having this understanding in your head will come through on the page. You don't have to spell it all out on the page (in fact, please don't!) - I promise it will come through. Like Magic.
2.  Know What They're Not Saying - We all have internal monologues, the thoughts that run through our heads that we don't vocalize. What your characters DON'T say is perhaps more important than what they do say. And no, you don't have to give this insight into their thoughts either. Like with their offstage lives, there's no need to detail this on the page (again, please don't!) - just trust that the magic makes it happen.
3.  Know Them In All Their Beautiful Complexity - So, this goes against A LOT of writing advice and Common Wisdom. The GMC method (Goal-Motivation-Conflict) can be a useful way of condensing the plot. When we're asked to create loglines for queries or back-cover copy, we have to do this. What do they want and what keeps them from getting it. But remember that this is about plot, about picking out the visible actions of the characters, the salient high points. If you think about a real person - yourself, for example - it's nearly impossible to condense to a single goal, motivation and conflict. If I asked you what you want out of life, it would be a long list. (Or a very short, umbrella one, like "to be happy.") Likewise with whatever is getting in your way. With the exception of people who've done tons of self-examination, few of us know what issues are keeping us from having everything we want. Thus, while you might find it useful to reduce your characters to a single, straight-line GMC, keep in mind the hugeness of who they are beside that. For the third time (do I really have to say it?), don't put it all on the page. But do know it. 

Trust in the magic. 

External Conflict - Picking At Scabs

Conflict generally comes in two flavors: Internal and External. They're easily defined. External conflict is guys with guns chasing you and trying to kill you. Internal conflict is your belief that you're trash and not worth saving - think of it as the psychological and emotional baggage that comes prepackaged with a character.

You already know I'm going to say that ANY conflict arises from character. Here's what I mean by that. In order to come up with plausible, interesting external conflict, I need to know exactly what kind of emotional and psychological issues my characters are carrying around. Why? Simple. External conflict exists to reflect and exacerbate internal conflict. Whatever you believe you cannot do, I, as author, must challenge you to do - and I have to make it terrible.

Example: you don't believe you can face a room full of zombie babies because you lost your baby to crazed, three-toed sloths six months ago. Guess where I'm going to drop you. I might also light that room full of rotting infants on fire with you in it - while you listen to all those raspy baby zombie voices whimpering in the gathering smoke. This is probably going to trigger you over the lose of your child and you'll have to make a horrifying decision. Kill all those creepy, crawly zombie ankle biters yourself to spare them the flames? Or run and let them all go up in the fire? You'll have to listen to their cries if you pick that last one. Or is that *your* baby's cry you hear?

External conflict should pick the scabs off the internal conflict sores. It should make characters bleed and leave them (at the black moment of the story) lying in a puddle of comingled blood and tears. Even if those are figurative.

By knowing what self-doubts, insecurities, fears and faulty beliefs linger within my characters, I know what kinds of external conflicts they have to face - anything that exposes those self-doubts, insecurities, fears and beliefs. Bonus points in plotting if the external conflict pushes a character past what she believes herself capable of withstanding. Such hard, implacable, external forces are necessary in fiction because novels compress the time it takes most mere mortals to change. Instinct tells us that without some pretty solid motivation, the hero is not going to just up and admit the error of his ways, resolve to be a better person and wander off into the sunset, no fuss, no muss. We have to rub his nose in his wrongheadedness. External conflict does that.

When I was planning and writing my first book, I knew the heroine had PTSD from having been a prisoner of war. Initially, it was a device that gave the hero some inroads into her psyche. In no way had I intended to hand that heroine back to the creature that had kept her prisoner. Yet. When I got blocked three quarters of the way through the book, it became clear that had to happen. It was her greatest fear and the greatest test that proved whether she'd learned her lessons from every other external conflict that had come before. (I hadn't wanted to give her back to the alien because in no way did I want the story to suggest that kind of thing could cure a complex issue like PTSD.) But hopefully, it's a reasonable example for how a character's own internal issues point up interesting external conflicts that will heighten those internal conflicts and make everything much, much worse.

Aspects

My characters and I exactly alike? Sheeyeah. I wish. Especially on the physical abilities side. Clearly not the case. Ari, Jay and the newest heroine, Cashel, are all super fit fighting machines. Me? I'm a gimp. This is writing at it's Freudian Wish Fulfillment best.

But let's delve into the concept of aspects - this is the notion that you aren't just one thing. Each of us is a conglomerate of a number of aspects. Think of a diamond with multiple facets. Each of those facets represents one of your aspects - a different face you present to the world and to yourself. Mother, daughter, sister, wife, business woman, writer, athlete, etc. On a diamond, facets reflect and refract light so the diamond sparkles. In humans, our aspects reflect and refract reality through our perceptions (there's some theory that we focus consensual reality via our perceptions - but that's topic for another day). Suppose you have a fender bender. How you filter that experience is likely to be different based on whether you have your newborn in the car or your boss.

The point to the aspects explanation is that every single character in my stories comes from some aspect of myself. This is necessary - my emotional processing is the only emotional processing system I know. I can imagine I know what someone else is feeling, but really, I don't - I can only relate someone else's anger to my own anger. When it comes to feeling things, each of us really is the center of our own universe. So while I try to make each character into his or her own unique individual, the only emotional reference point I have is myself and what I can imagine *I* would do if I had x background and found myself in y situation. Oh, look. The acting degree in action.

Does this include my alien badguys as well? Yes. The torture scenes? The terrible things people say and do to one another? Completely. I subscribe to the school of thought that suggests we cannot claim the fullness of ourselves as humans unless we're willing to acknowledge and embrace our shadow selves as well as our socially acceptable, sunshiny selves. The human animal is capable of awful things. It's therapeutic, mining that for story material. Though it should be noted that most bad guys aren't bad because they want to be - they're doing what they do for a good-to-them reason.

Regardless. My heroes and heroines - if we really want to be specific - they are what I wish I could be. Pieces of who I'd like to become. In every story I do, I think there's one thing all my heroines have in common - they start out alienated and isolated. Most of them are searching for a place to belong. I think that defined a good portion of my life until I found my fellow writers. In that aspect, my heroines are, in fact, me.

Send in the Clones

by Allison Pang

Reading the articles this week has made it pretty clear that most of us do tend to put a fair amount of ourselves into our characters.

Maybe it's that write what you know thing? After all, we should know ourselves best, so I suppose it makes sense. I think it's also easier to claim that MCs are Mary-Sue's or self-inserts a lot of the time, especially in the UF or PNR genre, simply because they're often written in first person. It can be hard to separate the author from the voice of the character.

(At least so I've noticed from certain co-workers who won't quite look me in the eye these days. Guess all that late night dream sex I'm having with daemons is a bit much for people to take.)

That being said, most of my characters have some bit of me stuffed inside - Phineas is my obnoxious side, Brystion is my arrogance, Moira is my uncertainty, Robert is my bravado, Charlie is my loyalty, Talivar is my  faith.

Melanie and Abby are a bit more complicated. In a lot of ways, Abby is very much me and how I see myself. Melanie is who I'd like to be. (Minus the whole soul-belongs-to-the-devil thing. It's not an exact science, mind.) And by that, I mean 1) She's a super-talented musician, 2) She's horrendously popular 3) She's got a bit of arrogance to her, but also an overall sweetness that just tends to attract people.

Or at least, that's what it looks like on the surface. If you follow along with the books, you know she has a fair number of her own demons to face down, so perfection from a distance, perhaps.

And then there's Abby.

When I started writing A Brush of Darkness, much of it was an exercise in catharsis. My mother passed  away in 2002 of a horrendous form of lung cancer - and I've never really gotten over that. I couldn't even bring myself to accept it or go through the grieving process, because in the back of my mind that meant I was admitting she was gone.

So I think I put so much of myself into Abby because writing about her own denial was my way of coping.

As similarities go, we have a lot.

Abby: Ballerina dancer (or former) - lost her career due to a car accident that took her mother's life and left her physically disabled with a gimpy leg, seizures and a metal plate in her head.

Me: I took a year of ballet in 6th grade, but never actually wanted to be a dancer. I was a track star of sorts in high school though and had an accident in an event that left my right leg pretty messed up. (Abby's issues are on her left side.)  It's hyperextended and atrophied and I walk with a limp, though I hide it pretty well most of the time. Add that to my long list of physical issues and you can see why I wanted a heroine with the same sorts of challenges.

Abby: Has nightmares about sharks

Me: Yes. Totally.

Abby:  Her mother listened to Tom Jones

Me: My mother listened to the Beatles, but I dig TJ, so it sorta made sense at the time.

Abby: Has an odd relationship with bacon.

Me: Yes.

Abby: Has an enchanted iPod with an infinite number of songs.

Me: I wish. I do have nearly 17k on mine though, so that's not too bad...

Abby: Is/was a gamer.

Me: Duh.

There are plenty more - mostly small things, though you might not pick up on them unless you really know me.

On the other hand - I don't have a small pervy unicorn living in my underwear drawer. I'm not sleeping with elven princes or deamons, either. (Though I probably would have grabbed the opportunity, given the chance.)



I'm not sure what all that stuff is after the song, but Clonie seems apt...

Me and My Shadow

by Jeffe Kennedy

It's easy to answer which of my characters I'm most like, though she's traveled some distance from her beginnings.

Gwynn is the heroine of Rogue's Pawn, first in the Covenant of Thorns books. (This is the Novel Formerly Known as Obsidian, for those keeping score at home.) "Gwynn" is the name she's given in Faerie. In the real world, her name is Dr. Jennifer McGee. If you know anything about my personal history, you'll totally get that name.

This is the first novel I ever tried to write. Before that, I wrote nonfiction, almost exclusively. Personal essays, memoirish-type stuff. After my essay collection, Wyoming Trucks, True Love and the Weather Channel was published, I started in on a narrative nonfiction work. Two of them, actually. One seemed too enormous and the other my editor told me to put in a drawer for a year.

So I started what became Rogue's Pawn. And yeah, I thought I was clever. So I wrote it as a faux-memoir. As if *I* was the neuroscientist who ended up at Devils Tower and got transported to Faerie. I used a memorist's voice and concocted this amazing, terrifying and whimsical adventure.

It was a cute idea.

It was a dreadful idea.

It was a mixing of genres that managed to drag both down into the bloodied muck of industry disdain. It took me a while to drag the story out of it.

One of the things I had to do to accomplish this was let Gwynn be her own person, her own living, breathing character and not ME anymore. Or rather, not Mary Sue Me, since Gwynn is a lot prettier, more powerful and just overall more interesting than I am.

But there's still a lot of me in her. An alternate me. Who I could become, if only.

Still, I'm very careful about visits to Devils Tower.

Shitting Diamonds vs Eating Them

by KAK 

Which of my characters am I most or least like?

I am least like my protagonists.

They all contain a piece of someone I'd like to be. Yes, they're all women. Yes, they're all far more physically fit than I could ever hope to be. No, they're not remotely human.

The Healer: A symbiont who fixes people from the inside. She has a temper like a neutron bomb. Likes to dive into glacier oceans ... naked. Oh, and she's blue and heavily tattooed.
Me: I get woozy at the merest whiff of hospital. A speculum is the evil Iron Man of the duck world. Needles will drop my ass before the vampire in scrubs turns around. While I like the idea of throwing things when I'm angry, I despise the reality of having to clean up afterwards. This means I don't throw, I twitch. Swimming? I don't have gills; therefore, I don't do oceans.
Admired Trait: She took down a villain who was publicly loved. She assumed the punishment that should have been his in order to protect his victims from social censure. I wish I had the guts and the wherewithal.

The Kontro: She's learning how to seize the freewill from specific people rather than entire nations. Fire runs in her veins instead of blood. She eats gemstones and has a set of parasites in her hands that extend into blades. She also has family issues -- "I beheaded my mother" sort of issues.
Me: I can't retain my own thoughts, much less dink with someone else's. I'm warm blooded, contrary to what beaus of bygone eras may believe. I may have shat a diamond or two -- but purely euphemistically. I much prefer to wear precious stones. As for my mother, she's alive and mostly well.
Admired Trait: She has an unshakeable sense of self, even though everyone around her is trying to convince her she's broken and needs to be "remolded." Plus, she's neither modest nor boastful. The very few things I know I know ... I can be a total dick about them.

The characters I am most like are the sidekicks.

I imbue the sidekicks with one (or more) of my exaggerated personal traits. If there's an opportunity to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, consider it done. Reserved in unfamiliar company morphs into a mute with highly expressive lips. Those twitchy temper tantrums are totally a sidekick's tell. Rude, crude, lewd, and socially unacceptable? Absolutely and as often as possible -- only the sidekicks gets to say the stuff aloud.

The fact I find myself funny may or may not translate to the sidekicks. That's up to the reader to decide.


blue woman image from: http://www.eons.com/groups/topic/2469617-TUES-THEME-Blue-Lady-
fire woman image from: http://www.freecomputerdesktopwallpaper.com/new_wallpaper/Fire_Woman_Wallpaper_freecomputerdesktopwallpaper_1280.shtml

ME = MY CHARACTER

by Linda Robertson

While the fabulous Ms. Jeffe is off sharing her fabulosity at a conference, (have fun and have a safe return!!) I'm taking over the Sunday post this week, and she gets to be the Hump-day word-whore.

"MWAHAHAHAHAAHA!!!!! The power! The ultimate power of the first post!"

"ALL SHALL LOVE ME AND DESPAIR!"

*sees a Thin Mint cookie has been slid to me by worried friends*

"Oh look, a cookie...." (nom nom nom)

Okay. What were we talking about? This week's post. Yeah. It's about what characters are most and least like us authors that create them.

Hmmm. A lot of my characters are nothing like me, but my main character, PERSEPHONE ALCMEDI, is like me in many ways.

1.) ME-People often call me Red. But that's because my hair is red.

ALIKE-Johnny calls Seph "Red." That's because she's the Red Riding Hood to his Big Bad Wolf.

DIFFERENT-Seph's hair is dark brown. But then hers is natural, too. Ha!

2.) ME-I'm a sassy, reliable chick who may be a little naive, but is willing to take risks, and will fight hard to defend family and friends.

ALIKE-Persephone is a sassy, reliable chick who may be a little naive, but is willing to take risks, and will fight hard for her family and friends.

DIFFERENT-Seph gets to include vampires and werewolves--some of them high ranking or even royalty--in her list of friends. While I've known some bloodsuckers, some dogs and some royal bitches, in general my friends are just really cool normal folk.

3.) ME-I love John William Waterhouse art, write books and work at a factory. I have my own home and a big black dog.

ALIKE-Seph loves John William Waterhouse art, writes a newspaper column and rents out the farmland she owns for income. She has her own home and a big black dog.

DIFFERENT-Seph has several each of: dragons, unicorns, phoenixes and griffons, as well as a vampire Beholder to tend them and vampire Offerlings as her personal body guards. I have no 'nanny' and I don't need bodyguards, but I do have /nearly/ a basketball team worth of boys. And their laundry.

4.) ME-I'm pagan. It ain't always easy. People have misconceptions. I detest the fakers.

ALIKE-She's pagan. It ain't always easy. People have misconceptions. She detests the fakers.

DIFFERENT-Seph has the fictitious advantage of having the Hollywood CGI-type special effects in her spell work, as well as the immediacy of sorcery. I have reality.

OTHER CHARACTERS. I think there's pieces of me in other characters as well. I gave my fun-loving, dirty-minded guitarist self to JOHNNY NEWMAN, and I gave my ridiculous love of big, old words and my desire for control to MENESSOS. 'Desire for control' sounds ominous, but in the real world things you can't control happen all the time. With Menessos, as an author, I have the option to use him to fix things for Seph, or...I can use Seph to teach him how that control can sometimes be bigger evil.

A real life example: A simple family vacation...it includes the precarious risk of trusting the GPS and ending up, at night, on a one-lane gravel road that runs between two lakes--with a modest eighteen inches to spare on either side--only to have about a dozen folks on foot come walking down the hill on the far side with wearing miner's helmets with the lights on. If they'd had pitchforks, I might have felt it necessary to run them over for safety sake, y'know? But they didn't. They were frog-gigging.

Creepy enough? How about adding in the fact that the road that took us away from there was--I shit you not--Cemetery Road.

Had we not had that little mis-adventure amid our journey, we wouldn't have that wacky memory and all the laughs we've had about it since.

As authors we are told to write what we know, and I guess we know ourselves, and by placing little pieces of ourselves into these characters, we get to go on sweeping adventures with the mayhem plotted out and the danger pre-planned. Unlike real life. :-D

I'm so glad and grateful for the readers who've elected to go on those adventures with me.