Another Way to Create a Character

In Paperwork (by Celine Nisaragi), the protagonist’s personality came from a combination of traits taken from my cat, my grandmother, and a pop singer. What about the other characters? Not one is taken directly from real life. So, where do they come from?

Another way to create a character is to think of a topic that you have strong opinions about. You can create a character who becomes your personal soapbox. Let them model your feelings about that topic. Let them rant and rave. Give them an opening, and let them riff on your hot-button topic.

In Paperwork, Sergeant Denny Dugan ends up in the hospital, and I’m the one who put him there. Love him or hate him, Sergeant Dugan is in Paperwork because I have a hot-button topic that he illustrates perfectly.

How to Create a Character

I just published my second novel (Paperwork, by Celine Nisaragi). It got started during a free, online course in how to write a novel. Creating the lead character was so much fun, and not done the way I expected.

Most people, if they are like me, believe the lead character is modeled after yourself or after someone you know. T’ain’t so. Not in a good story. Why? Because you will run head on into the wall of “so-and-so would never do that” or fall over the cliff of “but it didn’t happen that way in real life”. So, what do you do?

You choose three people that interest you, take three characteristics from them that you find fascinating, and create your character from those elements.

I chose (1) my cat– for its graceful movement, the comfort it feels in its own skin, and its ability to shrug off stress.
(2) My grandmother–I admired how she could talk to anyone, anywhere, and hold her own. I especially admired her uncanny knack of knowing who in her circle needed her help and her genuine concern for other people’s well being. She was down-to-Earth practical, grew her own food, and could cook amazing dishes out of anything she had to hand.
(3) A folk singer I know who has had a long, successful career and cannot read a note of music. He raises enormous sums of money, then gives it away without a second thought to human rights causes. He is getting on in years, but moves and acts like a much younger man.

You’ll find all of these qualities in Paperwork’s heroine, Cheryl Markovic Dugan. The paperback book is up on Amazon. If you don’t mind waiting, the Kindle version will be up in a few more weeks. The “look inside” feature (free chapter!) should kick in any day now.

While you’re waiting, maybe you would enjoy creating your own fictional hero using the above technique.

The Newest Title

My favorite writing guru, Donald Maass (“The Fire in Fiction”) had a suggestion: think of something that ticks you off, then have one of your characters riff on the subject. What ticks me off? Paperwork!

Paperwork is now the title of a novel starring the character Cheryl Markovic Dugan, a war bride from Dubrovnik abandoned in the US by her soldier husband. As a single mother struggling to hold on to her job as a night aide in a nursing home, Cheryl believes the ability to cope with paperwork is an over-rated skill. The only thing she really needs to read, she insists, is the human heart. Her formula works until the medical director of the home taps her to care for his aging mother, a retired high school English teacher. Cheryl pits her belief in intuition against the older woman’s insistence that, to succeed in life, you have to learn to read the fine print.

Paperwork will be published from my personal publishing empire, Turquoise Cat Books, next month.

Why Dubrovnik?

I have another work-in-progress. Unlike Katsuren and the Sam Ryder story, both set in Okinawa, this one features a heroine from Dubrovnik? Why there? Because I saw the most beautiful photograph of Dubrovnik, and the orange-roofed houses and jewel-colored sea looked so much like Okinawa, I could hardly believe the similarity. I started thinking about what kind of person might live beneath the tiled roof of one of those houses overlooking the coast and I thought, “Someone just like Sam–wounded by life but strong enough to re-invent herself!”

Her name is Capricia. She’s almost 40, and has already re-invented herself twice. Now she has to do it again or simply lay down and die. I’m not sure what the title of her story will be, but I already know how it ends. The working title is Destination: Dubrovnik.

What is a “sanshin”?

A sanshin is the musical voice of Okinawa. The instrument consists of a long, ebony neck that ends in a round sounding board about the same diameter as a volleyball. The sounding board is hollow, and covered with snakeskin on both sides. At the other end of the ebony neck are three pegs, one for each of the sanshin’s three strings.

A sanshin sounds warm and mellow. It can be played loud or soft, fast or slow. It is the perfect accompaniment to the human voice. Oddly enough, the sanshin repertoire contains mostly songs of joy or songs with uplifiting contents. I can’t think of even one song lamenting lost love or lost anything. Not even lost youth.

So it’s fitting that the hero of my new novel, a guy called Sam Ryder, should play the sanshin. He loses important parts of his life one after the other, but he never drops into lamenting mode. OK, at one point life–in the form of an attempted murder–pushes him close to demonstrating that a sanshin can also be a lethal weapon. But Sam Ryder loves life and deplores violence. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, much less a fellow human being.

Or would he?

Summertime is Reading Time

A writer may be defined as someone who writes, but I think good writers are also people who read. I’ve been reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and enjoying the way he states his personal opinions without actually stating them. Can anyone not know how he felt about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda after reading the following line about Fitzgerald’s chances of becoming a great novelist?
“I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him.”
I’ve also been reading Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose talent for choosing just the right word is legendary. How about this line from a pre-WWII essay set in Germany?
“Compared to the trim, drilled figures of the few soldiers there, the Storm Troopers looked like brown-paper parcels badly tied with string.”
English! What an amazing language!

Rain is Raining All Around

Rain or shine, never give up!

Okinawa gets a lot of rain, but it is especially conspicuous during the rainy season. Does it slow things down? Not at all. Rain, sun, it’s all part of Nature.
For this author, the rainy season is bringing the chance to go on a writing retreat. My new character, Sam Ryder of Okinawa, will benefit from the undivided attention he will be getting.
Be back in a few weeks!

My Character Now Sells Shower Caps

When you create a fictional character, you control that character’s story life–but you have no control over what happens to her once the story is out in the world.

The heroine of my first novel, Katsuren, is a young American archeologist with long blonde hair on an island where the women are all brunettes. As one way of calling attention to her appearance without actually screaming “Look! She has long blonde hair!” I put in a scene where she is moving into a hotel room and hanging her own,terry-lined shower cap on the bathroom door because the dinky plastic ones provided by hotels don’t work for her.

This is not a major scene. But it was picked up and put out on the Internet as an advertisement for someone’s line of bath products.

My character went to Okinawa to find herself as a newly-fledged archeologist, and now she is entering a second career as an Internet huckster.

Fate is funny, fate is weird.

Meanwhile, back in Okinawa

An excerpt from the Sam Ryder story:

Sam didn’t need a water buffalo. These days, no one needed a water buffalo. That’s why the owner of the sugar mill was giving the animal to Sam. He had electric motors to turn the cane grinders, so Mizuko was out of a job. Mizuko the water buffalo was only a link to times gone by, a piece of nostalgia who was getting on in years.

Okinawans, who ate anything that didn’t eat them first, had only one taboo concerning food. They never, ever butchered a water buffalo for its meat. Maybe these days no one needed a water buffalo, but there was a time when the animals’ muscle power was Okinawa’s salvation. As a token of gratitude, they allowed the animals their old age and a peaceful death.

Sam untethered Mizuko from the spoke of the crusher and led her to a borrowed truck. He walked her up the planks to the truck bed, and harnessed her securely. He flashed his trademark grin at the mill owner, even though he was quaking in his shoes. Mizuko was tame. She was mild. She was docile. Everyone knew there was nothing in the world more placid than a water buffalo. Sam knew it. Everyone said so, especially Mizuko’s former owner. But the facts remained. There were enormous horns only inches from his face. There were tons of animal balanced on tiny toes right next to his very own toes. Sam thought he should keep Mizuko company on the ride to her new home, but then the truck bed bucked when the driver put it in gear. Not a good idea, Sam, he told himself, knowing it was too late to change his mind.