The LadyKillers

Upcoming topic: A Day in the Life of

Be sure to read today's special Sunday post by honored guest blogger, historical author Margaret Frazer.

You Can Think I'm Dana if You Want To

Staci here, for today’s topic on how my character really isn’t me. I don’t worry too much about whether people think my main character, Dana, is really me in disguise. She’s not, for the most part. But I’d like to think she’s a fairly likable character, one that people can relate to, so if readers want to think I’m like her, then I’m totally okay with that.

It’s the supporting characters I’m worried about. When I first started writing the Dana Lewis series, ages ago, Dana had a younger sister and a set of parents. But the dad in the book tended to sit and read the paper while waiting for dinner and offer supportive remarks the few times he spoke. I was afraid he was too similar to Stephanie Plum’s dad in Janet Evanovich’s popular series. So I killed him off. I don’t mean he was the victim in the first book or anything, but I had him die of a heart attack before the book even opens. In essence, the dad never existed, except for fond memories and pictures on the mantel. When my own dad reads my book and asks why the father’s dead, do I explain that he wasn’t contributing to the story so I had to remove him? Will that offend my dad?

But my dad’s feelings are the least of my problems. Dana has a younger sister. I have an older sister. The two are nothing alike, except for their impressive fashion knowledge, but my sister will likely assume I used her as a model for Dana’s flighty, self-centered, immature sister. I didn’t, I swear (I’m making sure to type that in case she reads this blog  = ) ). I may draw on memories of our own petty squabbles and constant attempts to steal our parents’ attention growing up when I’m describing interactions between Dana and her sister, but the character is a complete figment of my imagination.

And thank goodness I toned the mom down. Now, she’s a somewhat sympathetic widow. Before, she was a demanding and critical nag. No way could I live down the phone call from my own mother as she asked in a crushed voice, “Is that what you really think of me?” I can feel the guilt already, and I never even did anything!

When my book is finally published, I’ll need to add one of those disclaimers about how the characters in the book are works of fiction and any similarity to real people is a total coincidence. But who reads the fine print? Certainly not my family. I just hope Thanksgiving dinner isn’t too awkward.

 

Am I my character? Of course! Well.... -- by Sharan Newman

  Ok, my characters don't look like me.  What would be the point of that?  Like Anne of Green Gables, I hated my red hair.  So Catherine has beautiful, thick black hair.  Since she never became a nun, her hair is in long braids that she keeps pinned up now that she's married.  I love her hair.  She also has a problem with being too thin, also wishful thinking. However, she has many of my faults (no, I won't tell you. You can guess from the events in the books).

Photo credit: Michael Allen Dymmach

In The Shanghai Tunnel, Emily looks even less like me, being petite with large brown eyes.  We have some things in common, though, (see parenthesis above).
But my protagonists are not the only characters in my books.  There are friends, family, passers-by and, best of all, villains.  I sometimes take them from real people.  I once found a perfect villain having dinner with his mistress in a remote corner of France.  He was rich, British, arrogant, and I knew his type was universal, certainly a prototype of a medieval lord.  But still, unless I didn't care if he appeared a stereotype, I had to try to understand him or at least make my version also a human being.  Many people have pointed out that mystery writers are by and large a friendly, easy-going group.  I'm not the first to point out that we let out most of our negative feelings by killing off peple who annoy us (only in print, of course) and by entering into the mind of killers in order to understand the darkness in ourselves.  A rather scarey sort of empathy is essential in any kind of fiction writing.  So yes, all my characters are a reflection of me, some distorted, I hope, but still lurking inside.
So the next time you bump into me at the supermarket or a convention beware of what might respond.  Offering to get me a glass of champagne is a good ploy to keep the Dark Side at bay.

Inez = Ann? Not!

Ann Parker here, every-other-Thursday blogger at The LadyKillers.

So, this week's topic is "My Character Isn't Me."

Wow. This is an easy one. I could just agree, and then sink back into the shadows at the back of the room. (Post = 49 words long; probably not long enough.)

 

Anyhow, the lurking behavior is me, but definitely not Inez Stannert, the protagonist in my  Silver Rush series, unless she's skulking about or otherwise trying to get the drop on someone. Inez is brave, strong, speaks her mind, thinks fast and on her feet, and faces conflict and confrontation without blinking. I can't lay claim to any of that. However, I was raised in a family chock-full of strong-minded, strong-willed women. And, being an observer more than a doer, a listener more than a talker, I watched and listened and stored it all away—the characteristics, the mannerisms, the reactions/interactions, the philosophies and psychologies.

I have to believe that the ease with which Inez marched into my imagination and took center stage in my stories is because I've known her, for a long time, probably all my life. She is bits from my mother, my sister, various aunts, grandmothers, great-aunts, etc., etc., all blended and melded together.

Yep, be careful what you say and do around a writer of fiction... you might find yourself (or a "shadow" of yourself) appearing in a story someday!

Camille and Sophie Have a Chat

 "Are you and I the same?" I asked Professor Sophie Knowles. "LadyKillers wants to know."

I had to remind Sophie that it was her creator, Ada Madison (my newest pen name) asking.

At first glance, my latest protagonist and I have a lot in common—a Massachusetts native, Sophie's a college math teacher who loves beading and doing puzzles.

"Are you fit, early forties, with a hot boyfriend?" Sophie asked.

Well . . .

Skipping over the age and dress size issues, Sophie's boyfriend is a former Air Force man who's now a medevac pilot for an air transport and rescue company. He sleeps in his EMT clothes, ready at the sound of an alarm to respond to a freeway accident in a snow storm or land a helicopter in the middle of a busy intersection.

For my husband of more than thirty years, a retired electronics engineer turned computer geek, "exciting" is getting notification of an update from Adobe.

 Clear enough?

Like most amateur sleuths, Sophie is very busy. She plans out a full day of classes, Internet research, and office hours, hoping for a little beading time in the evening and a getaway weekend with her boyfriend now and then. But, as is required in this mystery subgenre, murder intervenes, book after book, making her small New England campus more like a war zone than a place for philosophical discussion and higher learning.

The first two books in the series cover only a couple of months, but in that time, Sophie has had to deal with the murders of two colleagues, the possibility that students and friends of hers may be guilty of the crimes, and threats to her life by the real killers. She's been held at gunpoint twice, but bounces back in time to teach Advanced Calculus without missing a beat.

Sophie's days are full of sneaking into crime scenes, snooping around other peoples' files, and confronting her top ranking suspects.

Such is the life of an amateur sleuth, the kingpin of cozy mysteries.

Tell her to butt out and she tears down the crime scene tape and butts in before you cross the last t.

Tell me to butt out and I'm out of there in a nano-beat.

Sophie is a self-confident risk-taker. They haven't yet made the steroid that could bring me up to her speed.

 

I'm aware of the criticism sometimes levied against "cozies":  

"Pshaw. A lady who builds dollhouses is not going to solve a murder."

"If an ordinary citizen found a body, she'd  just call 9-1-1 while running away."

"The police don't need some retired physicist helping them solve murders."

But as popular as they are, cozy mysteries must be filling a niche, satisfying readers who want a good puzzle with engaging characters and a satisfying, logical solution.  

And before I allowed Sophie go back to playing with numbers and solving crimes, she reminded me of something her cop friend, Virgil Mitchell, told her—that the police solve most murders by persistent tracking down of people who knew the victim, spending endless hours talking to ordinary citizens. Miniaturists, math teachers, and physicists included.

(Hmm, murders aren't solved by that single microscopic fiber of carpet sold in only four stores in the country, stores that happen to keep records of every purchase in the last 20 years?)

For those willing to suspend disbelief—that a small college community can sustain a murder a month, for example—and enjoy a mystery in the cozy tradition of Agatha Christie, a world of reading awaits.

I'm happy to stay safe and cool in my office while characters like Sophie Knowles are out there, taking the risks for you and me every day!

 

 

 

My Character Isn't Me

Many writers do recreate themselves and/or people they know. Eugene O’Neill made a playwriting industry out of that. As for me, my main character isn’t me. They all are.

Now that you are rolling your eyes and ready to click over the page, please let me explain. I don’t possess multiple personalities, I just love theater. Having little talent at the acting craft, I make up for it in my mysteries. Well, sort of. Not completely.

Actually, it all comes down to this: our characters may not be us, but, if we don’t put ourselves into all the characters, how can we understand their many dimensions and make them real? Sometimes this is difficult.

In Sorrow Without End, I put myself into the mind of a man, slowly going insane, who had committed a murder. With Brother Thomas, I try to live in the head of a 13^th century gay man. Other times the effort is a romp. One of my favorite characters is curmudgeonly Sister Ruth, the competent but resentful sub-prioress.

In each case, I try to find some common ground within myself from which to grow each character (sort of like the proverbial mustard seed) who will finally become quite different from me. For an author to do this, it means facing that time when we have stood on the cliff of insanity, felt totally apart from the world we inhabit, or faced our worst nightmare. Other times it demands looking at aspects of ourselves and finding gentle humor.

Oddly enough, the most unsettling aspect of the question “how much of the character is you” is not the violence or the madness, it’s the sexual. Since I write about the Middle Ages, when the average lifespan was under four decades, I deal with people who were in their prime childbearing years. Sex was a major concern: want it, reject it, fear it, do it. There may not be much explicit sex in my books, but the atmosphere is often charged with this very normal part of life. For some odd reason, readers do ask how could you write that or even how dare you, the latter often accompanied by a look that eagerly wonders and did you? Is your character you?

Whether the issue is violence committed, sexual details, or troubling psychology, the question about the link between author and character always hovers.

The truth is sadly unexciting. Yes, we may find the germ or even several aspects of our characters within ourselves, but their full dimension comes out of common human experience. Characters are formed out of what anyone can learn from listening, observing, reading, contemplating, and just plain living long enough.

But, in the end, the best answer to the question was perhaps given by Georges Simenon, after rewriting the autobiography of his Belgian childhood into the fictional Pedigree. Everything is true, he said, but nothing is accurate.  

From Mary Anna--Life imitates art?

Our theme this week is, "My character isn't me."  It's a great topic.  I believe I suggested it.  I like it so well that I also believe I've already riffed here on that theme twice.  At least.  So what shall I talk about today?

Let's talk about Faye's sidekick, best friend, and soul mate, Joe Wolf Mantooth.  If Faye isn't me, than Joe really isn't me.  He's...well, a man.  He's also fearsomely talented in the ways of the woods--hunting, fishing, tracking, and crafting deadly weapons out of rocks and sticks. 

Joe was born when I started writing Artifacts back in 1998 or thereabouts.  At that time, I was living the quiet, busy life of a stay-at-home wife and mother of three kids who ranged in age from 3 to 13.  My life now almost couldn't be more different, so it's interesting to be living with characters I created back then.  People accuse me of creating my fantasy man in Joe, but that's really not why he was born. 

For plot purposes, I needed Faye to have a best friend who was a man, but who was not a love interest.  The reasons for this were threefold.  She needed a best friend, because she lived on an island and it was going to be darn hard to write 350 interesting pages if she didn't have anybody to talk to.  He needed to be a man, because...hmmm.  It's hard to explain.  The book just wouldn't feel the way I wanted it to feel with too much estogen floating around.  And he needed to be definitively not a love interest, because I had enough on my hands writing a mystery.  I just couldn't wrap my brain around writing a romance, too.

Therefore, Joe has attributes that could be interpreted as making him unsuitable as a romantic partner for Faye, one of which is the fact that he is nine years younger than she is.  Counterbalancing his unsuitability is the fact that he's as tall as a tree, he has a long black ponytail hanging down his back, and he's a really good cook.  I must have gotten it right, because Joe has been getting fan mail and love letters for years.

I'm going to have to sign off now, because I'm heading out to the Blue Ridge Mountains to go hiking.  (I can hear those of you who know me, snickering while they mutter, "You?  Hiking?"  Please be quiet.)  Perhaps I'm dimwitted, but it has taken me more than half a year to notice that my hiking companion is a very tall younger man who knows all there is to know about the outdoors.  And he can cook.

No ponytail, though...

Mary Anna

News and "My Character Isn't Me"

 
NEWS FLASHES!!

• Diana Orgain's Formula for Murder will be discussed at “The Killer Coffee Club” http://www.killercoffeeclub.com/ on Wednesday, May 18.
• Diana Orgain's The Maternal Instincts Mystery Series is one of the featured giveaways in Bay Area Parent Magazine this month – readers can enter the contest at: http://siliconvalley.parenthood.com/sv_contestcorner.php.

Coming Up: Who ARE these people in my head??

Next week's topic is "My Character Isn't Me." Of course, for some LadyKillers, maybe the opposite is true. Check in during the week and see what "we" have to say...

This is the one that got away!

 

I could have sworn I posted only last week. Meant to check the calendar just to make sure. Misread the calendar when I did finally check.

Color me embarassed, and color this post the one that got away.

Lest you feel I've cheated you entirely, here's a lovely quote from Sophocles:

"There is some pleasure even in words, when they bring forgetfulness of present miseries."

 

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

By Margaret Lucke

Fish? No. I almost never go fishing, and when I do I have pretty good luck. On my first fishing trip, at age five, I was the only person in the boat who caught anything.

Men? Yes, one or two interesting ones have slipped from my grasp. But when the really special one came along, I caught him and he caught me. We’ve been contentedly married for quite a few years.

In my case, when you tell stories about the ones that got away, you're talking about Brilliant Ideas.

Here’s an example: I'm driving along Interstate 80, passing the University Avenue exit. The  dashboard clock tells me it's 4:12 pm. The sun is shining, but over to the west wisps of fog are curling in through the Golden Gate. A Beatles tune is playing on the radio. There's a red pickup with a Nevada license plate in front of me and a minivan full of kids in the next lane. And at that moment an idea pops into my head.

Not just any idea--this is a Marvelous, Brilliant, Perfect Idea. It's the first glimmer of a new novel that’s guaranteed to top the bestseller list. Or it's the heretofore elusive solution to the problem that’s stalling my work in progress--the ultimate plot twist, perhaps, or the secret to a character’s motivation.

It’s so Marvelous, so Brilliant, so Perfect that I could never possibly forget it. So there's no need to write it down.

The next day as I sit down at my desk I can picture the moment in vivid detail. I can see myself driving on Interstate 80 past the University Avenue exit. I know it's 4:12 on a sunny afternoon with the fog curling in through the Golden Gate. I hear the Beatles song. I summon to mind the red pickup, the Nevada plates, the minivan, the kids. And I know that I had a Brilliant Idea.

What I can't for the life of me remember is what the Brilliant Idea was.

And no amount of wracking my brain or banging my head on the desktop will bring it back.

I know I should leap for pen and paper the moment my Muse knocks on the door and says, "Look what I have for you." I have the needed supplies everywhere--on my desk, in my purse, beside my bed. Usually I'm good about it. My office is littered with scribbled notes about my inspirations. But the Great ones, the Momentous ones, the ones that don’t get written down because they’re too Brilliant to ever be forgotten--those are the ideas that too often get away.

Has this ever happened to you?

Maybe I should forget about writing and go fishing instead.