Where Do You Find The Characters for Your Novels? a Post by R. Clint Peters

A novel can have one character or a million.  Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina had so many characters, either the author or the editor included a list to keep all the characters straight.  However, in To Build a Fire, Jack London worked with only the hero and a dog.

When creating characters, you have four possibilities:  yourself, people you know, people you hear about, or pure imagination.

One of my characters in the Pendergast and Ryce Dalton series is Oliver Pendergast II, or O2 to his friends.  O2 is a retired Navy SEAL.  What do I know about Navy SEALS?  I think I know enough to give the character some dimension.  I do read, I watch TV, and my next door neighbor for two years was an instructor at the SEAL training base on Coronado.  He might not have revealed all of his secrets, but there were many late nights around the apartment complex swimming pool.

Nancy Kress in Write Great Fiction – Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint wrote the following:

Like characters based on yourself, fictional creations based on others seem to be most effective when they’re cannibalized. Using people straight can, as in the case of using yourself, limit both imagination and objectivity. So instead of using your Uncle Jerome exactly as he is, consider combining his salient traits with those of other acquaintances or with purely made-up qualities. This has several advantages.

First, you can craft exactly the character you need for your plot. Suppose, for instance, that your actual Uncle Jerome is quick-tempered and cuttingly witty when angered and remorseful later about the terrible (but very funny) things he said while mad. But your character would work better if he were a stranger to remorse, staying angry in a cool, unrepentant way. Combine Uncle Jerome with your friend Don, who can hold a grudge until the heat death of the universe. Combining characters gives you greater flexibility.

Kress, Nancy (2005-03-03). Write Great Fiction – Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint (p. 7). F+W Media, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Throughout the writing process, I’ve kept a notebook of my characters, with details of name and which books they were introduced in.  So, when I need a forensic pathologist, I simply open my notes to a character named Molly.  She’s not the only forensic pathologist in my stable.  In From The Grave, I introduced Benjamin Smoot to my readers.  Ben is still at 9,000 words and 23 pages.

The benefit of fifty possible characters is using them over and over again.  O2 appears in all of the Ryce Dalton novels plus the Pendergast series, plus Pegasus Rising, a Nixon French novel.  He’s also been recently introduced in From the Grave.  If nothing else, he sure gets around.

If you have any thoughts to add to the character debate, please send them to theauthorsclub@gmail.com.  Next in the series will be Stars, Featured Players, and Furniture.

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