Whether at book signings or speaking engagements, I am most often asked how I got started writing. It’s almost always accompanied by, “Did you love to write when you were a child?” The other two questions authors are most often asked are, “Where do you get your ideas?” and “Are your characters based on real people?” I have to smile when the following thought is voiced: “I could see you in your main character, especially when…” and they name the scenes and particular actions by that character. I’ll start with the last comment first. (I also read magazines and newspapers back to front.)
“I could see you in your main character, especially when…”
The truth is I never write about myself, but my thoughts, beliefs, and even pet peeves usually make their way into the mix of “personality” or characterization or one or more of my characters in every book.
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“Are your characters based on real people?”
As strange as it seems, I find it very difficult to use people I know as prototypes for characters. In the past, when I’ve tried to base a character on a real person, the character turns out to be stilted or one dimensional. They’re flat and uninteresting. Oddly enough, created characters are more authentic, more believable, more rounded. Try it both ways, and you’ll see the difference. Trust me.
That isn’t to say that certain aspects of characterization can’t be used. Often when I’m writing a scene and a character reacts in a way that reminds me of someone, I use that action or those feelings to create a character whose actions and feelings turn out to be more authentic because they are real.
This happened in a book I just finished writing. I came to the final scene where a rather prickly character is talking about her equally prickly 91-year-old mother. As the daughter spoke to a women’s club about her mother, who was alive and well and sitting beside her, she recounted an earlier scene in the book in which she found out from an old friend what her mother was like as a young woman.
Here’s a very short excerpt from a scene that turns surprisingly tender for two characters who love each other but very seldom show tenderness toward each other:
“Well, what I’m here to say, is that I recently found out some things about my mother that I’d never known before. I realized I’d known her as a parent, but I’d never known her as a person…what she was like as a young woman, as a bride whose husband was away fighting for our country during World War II. I never knew what she had to deal with in the aftermath…” She looked down at Caroline and touched her shoulder. “I never knew that my father came back injured, body, soul, and spirit. But she spent countless hours nursing him back to health.
I’d written about both characters in this mystery series in six different books, but this time, while writing this scene, my own mother’s passing two weeks earlier was still fresh. My mother’s life was nothing like Caroline’s, and my life, nothing like Renee’s. (I hope! – Those of you who’ve read the Mystery and the Minster’s Wife know what I mean!) Yet I drew from the emotion of losing my own mom, wishing I’d known her as a young woman, thinking about the stories my aunt—my dad’s sister— had told me about my mom when they were teenagers and young women. The scene had nothing to do with what I’d just been through, but it had everything to do with emotion I pulled from within to write it.
Watch for places where your emotion may mirror that of your characters in your work. Most likely, you won’t see it coming; it will just sneak up on you and take you by surprise. Use that emotion and see what a difference it will make in creating a multi-dimensional character and an unforgettable scene.
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“Where do you get your ideas?”
Everywhere. Anywhere. Nowhere. A writer keeps a watchful eye at all times. I was visiting my relatives in North Carolina last winter while on the lookout for a new idea. A friend of my mother’s, Hugh Childers, sat down with us for lunch at Trinity Oaks, Mom’s retirement community, and mentioned in passing that he had gotten into watching web cams around the world. He visited the same sites so often he’d gotten to know the announcers by name. An aha! moment that turned out to work brilliantly, thanks to Hugh.
Later that same evening, my niece Kristin told me about a group she belongs to in Charlotte. About a dozen young friends meet for dinner once a month. They have but one rule: You say something negative about any of the others and you’ll get kicked out. That aha! moment—involving the subplot for the same book—took place in my brother and sister-in-law’s kitchen while Kristin put together one of her gourmet make-it-up-as-you-go soups.
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“Did you love to write when you were a child?”
I really didn’t starting writing until I was in high school. But I loved to read from age ten on, loved the sounds and shapes of words, the play of putting them together. I was reading a hundred young adult books a year from our school library, and by my second year in high school I was reading adult novels at a similar rate.
When I was a child I wanted to be a world-known classical pianist, an artist (I loved to draw and paint), or an archeologist. In college I found that there were dozens of music majors far more talented than I (I have to admit being a rather big duck in a tiny pond during my growing up years). Same thing with artists. And well, somewhere along the archeology fell to the wayside.
Writing had always intrigued me, but again, I never in my wildest dreams thought I would write a book, let alone, be published. Now, over two dozen books later, I can’t imagine my life without writing.
In the weeks to come, please stop by for new installments on Writer’s Tips. Next time I will be covering a trio of ideas taken from Joseph Campbell’s concept of the “Hero’s Journey,” THE WRITER’S JOURNEY by Christopher Vogler, tying both in to our personal life journeys with a new book I recently discovered, “THE PLACE WE CALL HOME: Spiritual Pilgrimage as a Path to God.
Until then, I invite you to send me any questions you might have about writing and editing.
