Today Charles Dougherty, author of the
Bluewater Thrillers, talks about the interesting people who inhabit his
fictional bluewater world.
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| At Amazon |
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
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| 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 :
Twitter: @clrdougherty.com
