Interviewing Characters to Get to Know Them

by Beth Groundwater

We're only about two and a half weeks away from the November 8th release of the third book in my Claire Hanover gift basket designer series, A Basket of Trouble. In anticipation of this critically acclaimed book, which was well-reviewed in 3 out of the 4 big review publications (Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly), I thought I'd give readers an insight into one of the tools I used to create the characters in the book.

To portray my gift basket designer sleuth, Claire Hanover, and my other characters realistically, I need to get into their heads and hearts and discover what they’re thinking and feeling. Only then can they become three-dimensional people that readers can love or hate. Sometimes this is easy, such as in Claire’s case, because she is much like me, a middle-aged woman with a husband and two grown children who lives in Colorado Springs and vacations in Breckenridge (I used to live in Colorado Springs and now live in Breckenridge). Other times it’s tough because the character has a very different personality from me. This was true for Claire's husband, Roger, and for Claire's brother, Charley, partly because they are men and partly because of their life experiences.

One tool I successfully used to understand Roger’s and Charley's psyches was the first-person character interview. In a first-person interview, the author pretends to be a trusted person in the character’s life (I was their psychologist), and asks probing, thoughtful questions. The critical element is to record the answers in first-person. The first person voice helps you really get inside a character’s head.

Some of the questions should address the book’s central theme or conflict and some should address the reason(s) why this character is so hard to define. Examples include:

What's the worst thing that ever happened to you or could happen to you?
What is your biggest accomplishment?
What do you wish you could do or stop doing?
How would you describe yourself and how would others describe you?
What's your biggest secret?
Why do you want what you want and how would you feel if you never got it?

The result of the interview should be that the character feels as real to the author as a member of her family. When she's writing a scene including the character, he should actually speak the dialogue in her head and she should be able to picture his gestures and facial expressions. How does an author know when she has succeeded? One clue is if her character balks when she tries to force him to do something for the plot that is out of his character.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview with Roger that I did for the first book in the Claire Hanover gift basket designer mystery series, A Real Basket Case.

How did you meet your wife?

"My wife. Love of my life." Roger’s expression grows soft. "I can still remember the first day I saw her on the campus of UC Boulder. I was a junior and she was a freshman. She was laughing with a girlfriend, tossing her long blond hair over her shoulder, and her eyes—so blue they could break your heart. Still can, you know." He stares out the window, his fist balled against his mouth as if fighting for control. "She's breaking mine right now."

It was through this interview that I realized the anger Roger was showing over his wife’s perceived infidelity and over being falsely accused of murder was really masking a deep fear that he would lose the love of his life. This helped me write a very emotional scene late in the book where Claire and Roger discuss whether their marriage can survive.

Claire's brother Charley is a new character in the series that is introduced in A Basket of Trouble. In addition to his trail riding business being threatened by the discovery of a murdered wrangler in his stable, Charley has quite a few emotional issues to deal with in the book. These include vestiges of sibling rivalry with Claire, their mother sinking further into dementia, a wife who props up her own self-esteem by cutting down his, and a trusted friend with immigration problems. To help me understand the churning emotions all these issues brought up in Charley, I interviewed him. Here's the answer to one question.

Which would be a harder blow, losing your mother or your business?

Charley let out a long, slow whistle. "Man, that's a toughie. I know Mom's illness is going to kill her eventually, and I've been trying to steel myself for the inevitable. But, it's still going to be damn hard when it happens. I'll definitely miss her, even though she hardly knows who I am now. Losing the business, though, I have to say would have a much bigger impact. That's Julia's and my livelihood. We'd lose everything--our income, our house, our friends. The people who work for me could lose everything, too, if they couldn't find other work." He sighed. "And I'd lose my sense of identity, my purpose in life. I'm a stable manager. I've never done anything else. I'm not sure I could do anything else."

The answer to this question showed me that even with all his other issues, the threat to Charley's business was still the largest one, in his mind, that he had to deal with. For a reader to understand and sympathize with a character, the author must first understand and sympathize with the character. And I use whatever tricks and tools I can to do that, including the first person interview.

Please visit my website to learn more about me and my books, including A Basket of Trouble, which will be released this month.

Guest Post from Marsali Taylor, Author of Death on a Longship

Let's give a warm, Inkspot welcome to author Marsali Taylor, author of Death on a Longship!

Creating Cass

It's the classic question:  'Is your main character like you?'  With Cass, the narrator of Death on a Longship, I set out to create someone who wasn't me.

I started by making sure she didn't look like me: small where I'm tall, dark-haired, with Siamese-cat blue eyes and freckles.   I made her Shetland-bred, but of non-Shetland parents: an Irish oil-man father, and, for an exotic touch, a French opera-singer mother.   She's the same age as my daughter, so that I'd get her younger memories right - where the discos were, and what music was popular.

My own hobby, sailing, was my way into her character.  I'm a teacher, with a home and family, so I gave Cass my dreams of wandering.  She's sailed three-masted ships under tropical stars, crossed the Atlantic and rounded the Horn.  She sails solo between Shetland and Norway.  She can even fix her own engine.
Creating a character is a stream of 'why' questions.  This Cass had no fixed home, no family - why not?  What was in her past, that stopped her risking a relationship?  I wanted a darker character, so I decided on a lover who'd died - and that was enough to let me start writing.  Then, as the book grew, the story of the 'selkie wife' swam out of my subconscious.

It's an old Shetland tale: the seal woman who's shed her skin to dance as a human on a moonlit beach - except that a young fisherman's watching, and hides her skin, trapping her in the land world.  When Cass was a teenager, I decided, she was wrenched from everything familiar.  Her father was given a job in the Gulf, and sent her to her mother, now pursuing her own career from an elegant flat in Poitiers, France.  Cass felt ' heartsick for the tide flowing past in jagged waves, the sucking noise of the breakers on the shore, the tell-tales fluttering white on Osprey’s red jib ... These French girls were land people, and I was plunged in among them like the selkie wife who’d lived as a seal among currents, suddenly married to an earthling and having to talk of supermarket prices and new sofas with the other wives.'

Then I remembered how, through the ages, seamen have been seen as 'different'.  Their clothes, their walk, vocabulary, all set them apart.  Writing through Cass's eyes, I consciously took on her world, deleting all land comparisons.  When she finds a dead woman on her foredeck, it looks 'like a marionette washed up by the tide, the manicured nails still gleaming like shells in the bloody mess the gulls had made of the exposed hands.'

That was the key I'd needed.  Cass is used to a grey, blue, silver wilderness of sea and sky.  She's fearless, self-reliant, quick-thinking, practical.  This crowded green land world, with birds gossiping in the trees and people scurrying like ants, is alien territory, a temporary halt between voyages, so she's never tried to make it home, any more than you'd buy ornaments for a motel bedside table.

I realised how that feels on the London underground, during a visit to my daughter.  I looked around me at all these serious-faced people, dressed in funereal black, not looking at each other, in this rattling box in a black tunnel, and didn't believe it.  My reality is a wide sky over blue sea framed by green hills, with white houses set along the sea-weed fringed shore, and people who greet you as they pass ...  That was Cass, that sense of detached incredulity.

So what about this lover?  If he'd tried to moor her to the shore world, and she'd had to do something so desperate to break away that it haunted her even years later...  I gave her a visible reminder - the scar across her cheek.  Glancing in a mirror, or the way other people don't stare, makes sure she can never forget.  Making her lover a Shetlander explained why she felt she couldn't come home.

I'd got fond of Cass by now, so it felt mean - but we authors are here to make life tough for our characters.  What's interesting about an easy life where everything's going right?

The selkie wife story never ends happily.  She's no choice about marrying the fisherman and having his children, but she slips out at night to stare at the waves.  Then, at last, her skin is found.  She catches it up, runs to the sea ... and is never seen again.

In Death on a Longship, the murder forces Cass to look at who she's become ... to ask herself if she wants to stay a selkie wife all her life.  There could be a happy ending for her - if she can find the courage to grasp it.

Death on a Longship Blurb

When she talks her way into a job skippering a Viking longship for a Hollywood film, Cass Lynch thinks her big break has finally arrived - even though it means returning home to the Shetland Islands, a place she hasn't set foot on since she ran away as a teenager to pursue her dreams of sailing. When a dead woman turns up on the boat’s deck, Cass, her past and her family come under suspicion from the disturbingly shrewd Detective Inspector Macrae.

Cass must call on all her local knowledge of Shetland, the wisdom gained from years of sailing, and her glamorous, French opera singer mother to clear herself and her family of suspicion - and to catch the killer before Cass becomes the next victim.

Giveaway Info

Marsali is giving away THREE prizes; a copy of Death on a Longship at each blog stop on her tour, a 1st place grand prize giveaway at the end of the tour of some silver Viking-inspired jewelry from the Shetland Islands, and a 2nd place $15 Amazon gift card.
1) To win a book: leave a comment leave a comment here > > (open internationally for ebook or the US, UK, and Canada for a print book). Be sure to leave your email address in the comments so we can contact you if you’re the lucky winner. This giveaway ends five days after the post goes live.
2) To win Viking-inspired Jewelry OR a $15 Amazon gift card: Click the link to go to the contest’s website and enter the Rafflecopter at the bottom of the post. A first and second place lucky winner will be selected on October 1st. First place person gets to choose which grand prize he/she wants. The second place person gets the remaining grand prize. Open to every country.
Here’s the contest’s website >

Marsali’s Bio

Marsali Taylor grew up near Edinburgh, and came to Shetland as a newly-qualified teacher. She is currently a part-time teacher on Shetland’s scenic west side, living with her husband and two Shetland ponies. Marsali is a qualified STGA tourist-guide who is fascinated by history, and has published plays in Shetland’s distinctive dialect, as well as a history of women's suffrage in Shetland. She's also a keen sailor who enjoys exploring in her own 8m yacht, and an active member of her local drama group.

Links

Amazon
Goodreads
Facebook
Pinterest
http://www.shetlanddialect.org.uk/marsali-taylor

Splat!

Cricket McRae

You would think on a blog written by mystery authors, I’d be talking blood spatter with a title like that.

Nope. Sorry.

Lately I’ve been refining my workshop on getting to know your characters better. It consists of nine ways to dig deeper when developing protagonists, antagonists and the secondary folks who populate fiction. The last time I taught this workshop I was reminded of a screenwriting intensive I took from Stewart Stern in 2006.

Stern is the soul-sounding writer of, among other things, Rebel Without a Cause, Rachel Rachel and the teleplay for Sybil. He wrote old-school style – no Vogler or McKee outlining how stories ought to work (though I bet he was familiar with Aristotle’s Poetics). In the intensive, he shared with us the impetus behind his genius.

He called it going through splat.

In fact, there is a documentary about his life, writing, and war (he fought in the Battle of the Bulge), called Going Through Splat: The Life and Work of Stewart Stern.

And here is an interview with him.

Splat was his way of talking about the difficult, psyche-scraping process of discovering something about ourselves that we have always avoided facing. In doing so, we are able to give that same gift to our characters. Protagonists in particular need to do that which they have always avoided in order to grow. 

Splat comes from wounds in the back story of a character. They do not have to be huge dramatic wounds – abuse, death of a parent, or great tragedy. But Stern maintained that there needs to be a point of connection between our protagonists’ back stories and our own. That connection may not be obvious to others, but we know it’s there.

Splat is facing the thing that stands in our way in our lives. Facing that thing creates hope. We may deprive ourselves, or hurt ourselves to avoid dealing with it, but in the end it is necessary. Stern maintained, “Courage is the price that life charges for peace.”

Splat is “being skinless in order to communicate,” to really tell the story. Your art lies in your own experience. Your fantasy about facing something you want to avoid is nourishing to others.

Do the thing you don’t want to do, to understand what that’s like, so you can pass that knowledge on. The mission of an artist “is to give to their audience one single moment in which they can glimpse their own capacity for greatness.”

So does all that sound like a bunch of hooey to you? While it resonates deeply with me, I think it does depend on what kind of story you’re telling. Applying the idea of splat to the lighter fare some of us write could defeat the purpose of providing, say, humorous escape. On the other hand, having that dimension of character even in a cozy provides a welcome depth – as long as it’s applied with a feather touch.

As a writer, do you dig deep, uncomfortably deep, to grant your characters life? As a reader, do you enjoy it when a writer does this?

Please Ignore Common Wisdom

by Robin Allen

Living a right life is fine for you, but awful for your characters. They need to make bad decisions. They need to do the wrong thing. They need to suffer and be insufferable. There has to be conflict, tension, mayhem. If you're not sure how to make that happen, start with common wisdom and have them do the opposite.

"Great people talk about ideas. Average people talk about things. Small people talk about other people." –Eleanor Roosevelt

Feel free to talk about ideas and things yourself, but make your character petty and mean. Have her gossip about everyone and everything, including herself. She feels put upon by the world and gets even by starting rumors about her handicapped co-worker, the twelve-year old boy who cuts her grass, the neighborhood Schwann's delivery guy, a fellow volunteer at the shelter. How would she handle a religious conversion?

"Be the change you want to see in the world." –Ghandi

That never works, does it? Perhaps your character is trying to be the change, all zippity do-da, courteous to everyone he meets, kissing babies and serving meals at a soup kitchen that feeds the homeless and their rescued dogs. Life is Good with a capital G. How would he react to finding out that one of the weekend-only volunteers has been telling everyone that his doctor put him on anti-psychotic meds?

"Eat right and exercise." –Mom

For you? Yes. For your character? Yawn. Pump him full of sugar and processed foods, then put him in his car to drive two blocks to the convenience store for a twelve-pack of Monster Mayhem, the 100% caffeine thirst quencher, for the party he's throwing for his friends to watch two weeks worth of Tivo-ed Ultimate Fighting matches. What happens when his grandma comes over with his favorite strudel?


"Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." –Ben Franklin

No, no, and no. Sick, poor, and stupid is much more interesting. Keep your character out clubbing into the wee hours (but please don't make her a vampire), then send her out at four o'clock in the afternoon to spend her last $3.00 on breakfast. What would she do with the puppy she agreed to take care of while her sister is on her honeymoon?

"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." –Winston Churchill

The only way an optimist would make for interesting reading is if he keeps getting sideswiped by life. Make things easy on yourself and make your character glum and suspicious and with a serious case of malaise. He won't bend down to pick up a dollar bill because he might get a paper cut. He wouldn't cross the street to avoid his worst enemy because he might get hit by a car. He won't accept a promotion at work because the pay raise will put him into a higher tax bracket. What does he do when his newly engaged brother asks him to be best man at his wedding?

"Eighty percent of success is showing up." –Woody Allen (no relation)

Reliability is a great trait for automobiles and overnight delivery services, but not for characters. Not interesting ones, anyway. Never let your character show up for anything—jobs, dates, classes, hair appointments. What happens when her parents force her to sign up to be a camp counselor?

Stories are about character change and growth, so the guys and gals who people your stories should be somehow different at the end. When you ignore common wisdom, you have a path for change. How you get there is what makes the story.

As writers, what methods do you use to define your characters? As readers, what are some of your favorite well-drawn characters?

Robin Allen
Author of the Poppy Markham: Culinary Cop Mystery Series
If You Can't Stand the Heat
Now available on Kindle, Nook, and eBook
See my poem "A Friday Afternoon" in the 2012 Texas Poetry Calendar

What's Your Sign?

Cricket McRae

Beauty is all well and good, but beauty plus practicality gets me going every time. I was talking with a friend about my grand plans to create a potager garden in the backyard. In case you're wondering, a potager is a vegetable/herb/edible flower garden which has been landscaped like a decorative garden, with borders and hardscape planted for aesthetic value as well as plenty of edible produce.

My friend remarked that I’m such a nut (Nut? Bah.) about such things because I'm a Taurus.

Sigh.

Fine. Take my fabulous and unique personality and boil it down to a star sign. A quick online search told me the other things which supposedly define the majority of us born in May.

Loyal, patient, calm, good with money. Good cook and homemaker. Nurturing. Warm-hearted, fair-minded, unpresumptuous, down-to-earth. Dependable. Strong. Trustworthy. Efficient, nature-loving, morally and emotionally courageous. Healthy. Not easily provoked or deceived. Generous.

Looky there. I'm a saint. Maybe this astrological stuff is right on the money after all.

Oh wait. There's more?

Thick-necked (!) Lazy, plodding, conservative. Overindulgent, stubborn and resistant to change. Sensitive, aggressive, stoic. Obstinate. Fond of luxury. Materialistic. Have a propensity to gamble. Either muscular or plump (depending on the degree of laziness one exhibits). Fond of fine food and drink.

Good Lord. I sound like Henry VIII.

So there you go. Forget the 25 random things about me tags, the Facebook quizzes; there I am in a nutshell.

Did I mention the tendency toward sarcasm?

Despite having neither a propensity to gamble nor being particularly resistant to change (Random thing: I've lived in fifteen different towns, three of them twice.), I'm fascinated by how the characteristics reflect two sides of the same personality coin.

I'm playing around with a new series idea, and want the characters, none of whom I've written about before, to be fully developed before I plot too much. In my experience those kinds of characters practically plot themselves, making my job a heck of a lot easier. This admittedly cursory look at the zodiac made me think about their personalities in terms of how traits may be interpreted differently by those around them: Is my protagonist practical or plodding? Strong or obstinate? Depends on your point of view.

Alternatively, the same trait might be affected by nature or nuture. For example, someone who could be good with money ends up being a gambler instead because they're lazy and overindulgent.

Now, I'm not sure I'm inclined to assign my characters zodiac signs as launch pads for their personalities, but it's a thought. At least I might mix it in with my usual detailed backstory and occasional character interviews.

How do you add layers of meaning and motivation to your primary and secondary characters? Have you ever thought about your characters' astrological signs?