More Questions and Answers/Patricia Potter

I’m continuing with some of the questions you posed in comments to this blog several weeks ago, the one asking what YOU would like to hear an author talk about.

The most common question I and other authors get is where do you get your ideas? I tried to address that.

But that leads to another: where do we get our characters?

One person said they were interested in when characters come alive for writers. “Do you know things about the characters that aren’t in the story.” Great question.

And the answer is yes. Most definitely. Once I develop a character, I live him/her/they twenty-four hours a day until the book is finished. I know what they look like when they wake, I know what they like for breakfast, and I know every part of the childhood, though only a bit of that might creep into the story.

Like a basic plot, a character might come from anywhere. One respondent on the blog asked whether characters/plot came from real life experience. Some do. Some don’t.

My favorite recent character was Robin Stuart, a reporter with a major Atlanta newspaper. She came directly from real life experience, and the story had been in my head for twenty years. I was a reporter with the Atlanta Journal and the plot in “Tempting The Devil” was a story I covered for the paper. It involved the murder of three police officers and, like Robin, I was recuperating from an accident, wore a brace on my leg and had a lot to prove.

My latest heroine (Catch A Shadow – March ‘08) is also modeled after a real person. I met Pat (yes, she’s also a Pat) when I was a poll watcher during the last election. The precinct was located in a fire station and, during a lull I wandered into the interior and started talking to the firemen. They were all men and inordinately proud of their lieutenant who was also a paramedic. One fetched her, and a woman with a long, blond ponytail strode out. We met for lunch several days later and I reveled in the stories she told. She was one of the first women in the department and the first woman lieutenant. She was also an incredible human being. She and her husband, also a fireman, rescued abandoned and mistreated mules, and her eyes lit when she talked about any kind of rescue animals. She talked with great empathy about the mentally disturbed patients she encountered. It was obvious she had a special affection for them and she was always the one called when there was a particularly difficult patient. A natural heroine in every way. There was so much I wanted to put in the book, but too much information doesn’t work in a suspense.

I’m thinking now about another person I met on a tour. I started talking to the tour guide, a woman in her forties, who traveled all over the world ushering around all kinds of people. The internal bells started ringing again. What if a murder suspect tried to hide among her charges? And what if they went to an island and were suddenly marooned by a fog, then a storm? Yep, you got it. The setting is Catalina Island, which was part of the tour.

Truman Capote once said that “everyone who survives puberty has a story to tell.”
How true.

But back to the question. When do they come alive? Usually one character – either hero or heroine – is very much alive from page one. The other characters are built around him/her. If the heroine is a pacifist, I want to hero to be a warrior. I want to create as much internal conflict as possible between the protagonists. Conflict in personalities, in goals, in backgrounds, and eventually the counterpart develops, and I get to know him, or her, during the first few chapters of the book. By the middle, I know them very well. On the last page I have to bid farewell and banish them to a cabinet in my mind. I often can’t remember their names four weeks after I've finished the book.

The new people have taken their places.