Do you get into your characters?

I don't know about you, but I know a book-in-progress is going to be good when the characters take over. Apparently, it's not just my characters who do that. Carolyn J. Rose is here today to talk about her characters and to answer these two questions:

Do you get into your characters?

Or do they get into you?

In case you haven't already met Carolyn, let me tell you a bit about her.

Carolyn J. Rose is the author of several novels, including Hemlock Lake, Through a Yellow Wood, An Uncertain Refuge, Sea of Regret, A Place of Forgetting, No Substitute for Murder, and No Substitute for Money. She penned a young-adult fantasy, Drum Warrior, and a cozy mystery, Death at Devil’s Harbor, with her husband, Mike Nettleton, author of The Shotgun Kiss. 

She grew up in New York's Catskill Mountains, graduated from the University of Arizona, logged two years in Arkansas with Volunteers in Service to America, and spent 25 years as a television news researcher, writer, producer, and assignment editor in Arkansas, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington. She founded the Vancouver Writers' Mixers and is an active supporter of her local bookstore, Cover to Cover. Her interests are reading, gardening, and not cooking.

(I'm totally with her on cooking!) Please welcome Carolyn J. Rose.

Do you get into your characters?

Or do they get into you?

Recently I was chatting with a group of writers and, at the risk of being told I should wear an aluminum foil helmet to block the signals, mentioned that there comes a point in my novels when I feel the characters try to take the wheel. They start suggesting plot twists and chance encounters, romantic interludes, comic moments, and dangerous dilemmas.

“You mean,” another writer asked in amazement, “your characters know you’re there?”

To me that was a no-brainer. Of course they do. And I have no problem with that, even though she seemed to feel I was breaking a cardinal rule of writing. Furthermore, it seems that I have no choice in the matter.

As I finished up the first draft of No Substitute for Maturity, the third in my Subbing isn’t for Sissies series, characters started suggesting scenes for a fourth book. I’ll take all the help I can get, even help from fictional folks, so I dutifully wrote these ideas on file cards. Will Allison learn to drive? Will Mrs. Ballantine perfect her routine for that Las Vegas reality show? Will Barb get a full-time teaching job? Will Dave propose? Will Cheese Puff have to deal with a rival for Lola’s affections?

Notice that I wrote the suggestions in the form of questions. That’s my way of telling my characters that I’m still the one in charge, the one who decides what gets on the page.

Meanwhile, the characters I developed for Hemlock Lake and Through a Yellow Wood are also haunting my dreams and invading my quiet moments. I have file cards for them, too. Fortunately—because there’s only so much room on my desk for stacks of file cards—characters from my other books seem to feel I left them in good places and so far they’re content to stay there.

I work at getting into my characters, thinking about their back stories, their skills and failings, their biggest hopes and fears, what they do if they hear a bump in the night, etc. Apparently while I was doing this my characters were getting into me.

What’s your experience with your characters? Leave a comment and we’ll put you in the drawing for the e-book of your choice from the ones I’ve written.

Thank you Carolyn - for the post and for giving away an e-book! Now, everyone...leave a comment, please.