Charles Dougherty's Interesting Characters

Today Charles Dougherty, author of the Bluewater Thrillers, talks about the interesting people who inhabit his fictional bluewater world.

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THE CHARACTERS

Your characters seem very real and the sort of people you might meet in the islands. Do you know or have you met the characters in your books?

The characters in my fiction books are composites.  Their personalities and physical traits are always borrowed from real-life people, but none of them are real people.  I’ve always been a people-watcher, and when I see or hear something interesting, I often imagine having a character say, do, or look like whatever caught my attention.  It’s fun to mix and match behavior and appearance.  The character Sharktooth, for example takes his physical appearance from a gentle giant that I know.  His Rastafarian beliefs and lack of adherence to them come from another friend who is a commercial fisherman.  The controlled violence in his personality is drawn from yet another acquaintance, a former bodyguard for a deposed dictator down here.  His bald head above dreadlocks and his wry sense of humor belong to another water-taxi driver down island.

Who would you like to play your main characters in a movie?

I never know how to answer that question, because I’m completely out of touch with movies.  When we’re visiting back in the states, we sometimes watch DVDs, but I have no idea who the actors are.  I could pick some of the people that I’ve encountered in real-life, but their names wouldn’t’ mean anything.

Would you like to live next door/next berth to your characters? Why or why not?

That could be fun.  Most of them would make pretty good neighbors, if you overlook their quirks.  The villains, of course, are another matter.http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0053GWJ3M

At Amazon

Which of your characters would you least like to meet in a dark alley?

Mike Reilly, from Bluewater Killer.  He’s the scariest one to me, because in some ways he’s so normal, yet he’s completely unpredictable.  He’s provoked to violence by things that most people never even consider.  While some of the other characters may be more consistently dangerous, they’re easier to understand.

How do you determine your character’s flaws?

I try to develop characters that have the same basic elements of personality that all of us have.  I think that we have character flaws that are a result of adapting our behavior to accommodate to our experience.  That leads to certain traits being emphasized at the expense of others.  What may be a character flaw in one situation may have been a strength in a former encounter.  In the case of a villain, I often don’t spend much time delving into the causes of character flaws; the villian’s job is just to be bad, unless the villian is the focus of the story.  Significant characters need to have flaws consistent with their personalities and backgrounds, and I think the flaws should be exaggerations of traits that exist in all of us.

Would your main character make a good roommate? Why or why not?

I think Dani Berger would make a fine roommate for the right person.  She’s loyal, hard-working, and intense, but she does have a violent temper and the skills to make her dangerous when she’s provoked.  She and Liz Chirac seem to get along fine; Liz’s cool head balances Dani’s temper.

Which characteristic do you consider most important in your main character?  She’s believable, at least to most people.

Thanks for hosting me, and have a great 2013.

 

MORE ABOUT CHARLES DOUGHERTY

Website:  www.clrdougherty.com 

Sailing blog about life afloat: http://voyagesoftheplayactor.blogspot.com

Books for Sailors and Dreamers (Non-fiction) : http://www.clrdougherty.com/p/books-for-sailors-dreamers.html

The Bluewater Thrillers :

 http://www.clrdougherty.com/p/bluewater-thrillers.html

Twitter: @clrdougherty.com 

           

From Animals to Characters--How stories evolve

Barn Owl

I'm an animal lover, have been since day one. I find them beautiful, elegant, and loving—not necessarily toward me, but toward their offspring and groups or packs. Molly the Barn Owl and her mate, McGee, entranced me for months. I still check in from time to time for updates. Watching them, waiting for the eggs to hatch, the babies to grow and finally branch and fledge (owl-speak for their first steps outside the box and first serious flight), and then the cycle began again. McGee, the magnificent and relentless hunter, Molly, equally fierce in the care and teaching of her young—what wonderful creatures! I learned a lot about barn owls and wish we had a suitable habitat so I could put up an owl box. Instead, I'll have to content myself with writing about them.

Emmett

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I met the most charming little screech owl. Emmett was injured and is no longer able to hunt, so he lives with the kind people at PAWS-SC. His companion is Tosh, a barred owl who's blind in one eye, so he's another permanent resident.

Furry animals—wolves, dogs, cats, rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels—they all intrigue me. We don't have any wolves, but the rest live around us. We feed them and discourage predators, such as the black snake who lurks in the woods behind us.

So what about a main character who works with animals? I'd have to do some research, which should be great fun. I like this idea. It will be a man, because I can see him now. Would you believe he has dark hair tied back in a low ponytail? This is how characters come to life for me. Oh, it's Charlie! That's a surprise. He already exists in a story I'm working on. It just took me a minute to recognize him. Now I'm eager to get back to the story because I've discovered another facet to his character. He takes care of injured animals. He was a medic, injured in the Middle East, and is badly scarred. He has PSTD and is up and about at night, so he could easily find an injured owl. He's a character I love.

Red-shouldered hawk in back yard

Who could not like writing fiction? It's full of surprises and delights, and you meet the most interesting people. And you can always find ways to use the things you enjoy.

How do characters come to you? What's first, the character or the storyline? In this new one, I met the heroine first and sort of fell into her story. Then one night, Charlie stepped out of the woods.

I'd like to know how you find your characters. For me, it's the best part of writing.

Creating Interesting Characters

Lauren Hutton's Teeth

Characters are usually the most important part of a story. Even the best plot needs good characters. Strong, interesting characters stay with me for years, maybe always. So what can we do to help make them vivid and real?

Show characterization through actions and reactions; keep descriptions visual whenever possible, but that doesn’t mean to give a driver’s license description. Show rather than tell. There are at least five ways to show your character to the reader:

1. Through physical attributes

2. Through psychological attributes and mannerisms

3. With clothing or the manner and style of wearing it

4. Through actions

5. In dialogue

Physical attributes are more than hair and eye color. You might show how the person walks—does he walk, swagger, amble, sidle, or slither into the room? Does he look directly at you when he talks or does his gaze slide away?

Show, don't tell. Give her an unusual feature. Remember Lauren Hutton's gap-toothed charm? That little imperfection was endearing and made her stand out.

 How the character looks can be shown through the effect on others. Instead of She was breathtakingly beautiful, you might say Joe and every other man present forgot to breathe when Angela entered the room. Instead of George was big and mean-looking, try something like Walking with George was like walking with a Doberman—one look and people made way in a hurry.

Who could forget John Wayne's walk?

Clothing can show a great deal. Is the character neat and clean but wearing an obviously homemade dress? Does Dan have snagged threads and salsa stains on his Dior tie? And there's always the church organist with the red lace underwear. List all the physical characteristics on a separate page so you don't forget that on page twenty she had green eyes and on page two hundred you make them match the topaz necklace she's wearing. If she's only an inch shorter than another character, she'd better not be looking up at him unless she's sitting down. I often use pictures I cut from magazines or wherever and tape them to the wall by my desk.

Mannerisms are good ways to make a character memorable, but use the mannerism sparingly. Don’t limit your character to a single action so that you repeat the same thing over and over.  Instead of having her twist a strand of hair around her finger until the reader wants to cut it off (either the finger or the hair—watch those pronouns), find ways to vary a nervous habit. Make a list of applicable verbs if she plays with her hair: chew, finger, pull, stroke, tuck, whatever. Or maybe she fiddled with her clothing, adjusted her glasses, pushed her hair back, picked at her nails. Use these things sparingly.

You can also use physical surroundings, the character’s past, and his or her name to enhance the character’s personality. Someone told me that Margaret Mitchell started out calling her heroine Pansy. Thank goodness she changed her to Scarlett. How about Eudora Welty’s Stella Rondo? The name rolls off the tongue and stays with you. Faulkner’s Colonel Sartoris Snopes. It suits the character.

Do you have any pet peeves? What turns you off? Turns you on? How do you come up with interesting characters?

When Characters Won't Cooperate

The romance is gone—actually, it never was. What do you do when the two main characters in your romantic suspense refuse to go beyond "like"? I've tried forcing them, but the scenes are artificial and flat. Somehow they got to be friends, but the chemistry isn't there. No zing. Also, this book is too short. And I don't like the ending I had planned. I'm not sure where it all went wrong, but it did. If it doesn't interest me, why would it interest anyone else? When I start looking at the state of the house instead of wanting to write, I know I have a serious problem.



Mr. Very Right



The secondary characters work. It's the hero and heroine who are lacking. Yesterday I realized part of the length problem is because there's been no romance along the way, something that usually happens over a number of scenes. Ramona Long triggered that thought by asking if the romance overwhelmed the suspense. Nooooo, but it made me think. It's a good question. What do you ask if your story's not working? I don't want to trash 190 pages and other characters I really love. How do you figure it out?



Mr. Too Wrong?



The right Mr. Wrong? 

So what to do? I've tried making Mr. So-So into Mr. Right, but it didn't work. She keeps taking off on her own. After much nail-biting and procrastinating, I think I got it. He's about to become Mr. Wrong. I need to research how far I can go with a federal prosecutor, but if necessary, he'll have to drop out and find a new job. He's undergoing a personality transplant as I write this. She has to change a little too. Then maybe the ending will work itself out. We shall see, but I have hope.