The Making of a Character
It’s been a minute since I’ve added a blogpost on this site, but yesterday I went wild and posted on Substack and crosspost it here for those who do not follow me on Substack.
Years ago, I bought a domain name: IndelibleCharacters.com. I wasn’t sure what I wanted it to become, only that the phrase captured something I felt I needed to explore: actual and fictional stories with characters who stay with you long after you’ve read the last page or decades later after you’ve moved away from them. But alas, I never published even one page, and I stopped paying to hold the name. Today I decided it’s time to start bringing that initial idea back to life in this Substack and give it a twist toward the process of creating fictional characters and treat it as a kind of laboratory for me to create and grow characters for my own fiction writing.
Why Focus on Characters Rather than Plot?
Currently, I’m writing thriller and mystery stories where plot is of paramount concern, but no matter how clever a plot may be, we only remember a story if we remember the people in it. A character doesn’t become indelible because the author describes them perfectly—the color of their eyes, the bounce in their walk, the tenor of their voice. They stick because they feel true—as if we’ve met them before, or might meet them tomorrow.
The Actor’s Lens (Backwards)
My background is theater, though I never fancied myself a playwright, I loved directing, have devised work for the stage, created puppets and masks, designed sets and uncomfortably have gotten under the lights to do a wee bit of stage acting. Although I’ve long abandoned my theater work, I find that what I learned in that medium has application to creating narrative fiction. Here’s my working theory: writers and actors are solving opposite problems.
- Actors are given dialogue and stage directions. Their job is to uncover the subtext—those hidden motivations, fears, and longings that make the lines playable.
- Writers, by contrast, start with a blank page. We have to create the subtext before we can even write the lines. That means pulling from our own lived experiences, emotions, and memories, then reshaping them inside fictional circumstances.
I think of it as “backwards acting.” Actors dig down into the text to find the truth. Writers dig into the truth to generate text.
What You’ll Find Here
This space will be a mix of:
- Craft insights — posts about shame, longing, projection, and other inner forces that drive characterization.
- Process notes — real-time reflections on how I build characters in my current fiction projects.
- What-if exercises — mashups that take real people from my life and reimagine them in unexpected roles. (Example: What if my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. VanPelt, was the hostess at a strip club?)
Why Write It Publicly?
Because writing fiction is private, often solitary work—but character is universal. Every writer wrestles with the same problem: how do I make this person on the page matter? Documenting my experiments, struggles, and occasional breakthroughs might help me—and maybe help you too.
An Invitation
If you’ve ever wondered how to take a person from memory and transform them into someone unforgettable on the page, welcome. That’s the journey I’m on. Let’s see what we can discover together.
The Laboratory: Dee Majors, amateur sleuth
Currently, I’m crafting a not-so-cozy murder mystery set in a fictionalized version of my hometown. My amateur sleuth is a seventy-something ex-lounge singer who suspects her past-sell-date neighbor did not die in her sleep of natural causes but was murdered to keep her quiet about a crime she witnessed. Part of what has been holding me back from finishing the first story in my planned series of interconnected short mysteries is the fear of not setting up the series in a way that it can organically grow and thrive. I started asking myself: How can I develop my protagonist to work not only for this story, but to be rich enough to carry through the collection?
I reached for a writers’ craft book on my shelf and found an article by Sara Paretsky, a Chicago icon of detective fiction. She gave me some sage advice in her article, “Writing a Series Character,” and taught me how to think about it. She pointed out with examples that solving the crime is only the resolution to the individual story. But in a series, the greater problem does not resolve until the end of the series, when the protagonist closes the unfinished business that drove her to pursue her investigative work.
I asked myself: Why would Dee Majors take on the job of solving a crime, especially one that may not even be a crime? I had already decided she grew up in the shadows of a business her father ran, a lively lounge in the town. The upstanding townsfolk had always suspected him of being connected in some way to the Mob. Small towns have long memories, and their jaded opinion of Dee’s family ties had colored her ability to be fully accepted in the local social circles. Now retired with time on her hands, Dee wants acceptance and feels she has something to prove. If she can solve the murder, maybe she can show the community she has something to contribute.
That hasn’t felt like it is enough. So, I look toward the Story Grid. As a member of the Story Grid Guild, I follow Shawn Coyne who urges us to find the personal in our writing and connect to that to find the Truth in our fiction. A small-t truth is something like grass is green. Capital-T truth is more difficult to quantify. It’s more like how something we’ve experienced feels, and that’s what we have to bring to the characters who inhabit the settings we put on the page. That’s what makes fiction come alive and resonate with the reader.
My family owned a small-town bakery on the Jersey Shore, and when I turned 21, my father took me on an odd journey one night. We worked our way down the shore from bar to bar, where he seemed to be a known and respected patron. I went with the flow and gabbed with folks he introduced me to. It wasn’t until the end of the evening when we got home that I understood what had been on his mind. He said, “Never go back to those bars and do not socialize with any of the people we met.” None had been my type, but I asked anyway, “Why, Daddy?” His response was a stern and heartfelt bit of advice. “They are dangerous people, gangsters, and if you are around any one of them when something goes down, your life will be in danger. Stay away, so you do not see anything you shouldn’t see.” My emotional response to that was confusion about why my father would think that was my beat and I would enjoy such company. Then I asked why he seemed so buddy-buddy with that crowd. He explained. “It’s the cost of doing business. If I want flour and sugar delivered on time, I have to pay the Mob.” What if I put Dee in my shoes? Will it add some intrigue and complexity to her backstory? What if that shady gangster life was part of Dee’s upbringing? What if the young Dee had witnessed something going down in her father’s lounge and had been called to testify against the Mob? These are conditions I can bring to my character’s background. Her father would have pressured her to cover up for the Mob to save both their lives.
Today, I decided that teenage Dee witnessed some shady business between low-level mobsters who were an inconvenient part of her father doing business in a mid-century New Jersey town where the Mob controled the trucking industry that delivered supplies. At some point in her young adult life, the court subpoenaed her to testify against one of those mobsters. Instead of telling the truth, Dee doubled down on her father’s advice to keep quiet. The mobsters went free, and she suffered ostracism because the townsfolk knew she lied. She never got over the shame of refusing to contribute to the cause of justice, and the townsfolk never forgot what she did.
Now I have a redemption story arc that will carry my mystery series. Dee wants to serve justice to prove she is worthy of being accepted.