RELATIONSHIPS MAKE CHARACTERS INTERESTING

I doubt many novels have been written in which characters didn’t interact (actually or virtually) with other people or animals. Think about it. Relationships, not really appearances or jobs, make characters interesting to readers.

I looked at dozens of columns written by psychologists, experts on managing stress in the workplace, and writers of columns to the “lovelorn.” In essence, they mentioned three key issues central to all relationships. You can add depth to characters in your novels by showing their relationships in terms of these parameters. 

1) Communications

A sympathetic protagonist listens patiently to others. He/she communicates through actions as well as orally. 

Characters not interested in a relationship interrupt, raise their voice, doodle, look at their watch, or pick at their nails when others are talking. They nag their cohorts. These are good traits for villains.

In Murder...A Way to Lose Weight, Abel Raines never really listens to Richard Varegos. He's always busy cleaning his office or doodling. That's how I hint the two colleagues (who are both faulty members at the university hospital and apparent confidants) might not be friends. While the main question in Murder...A Way to Lose Weight is who killed the diet doctor? One of the subplots in this mystery is: what do these two men have in common, besides work? Can they trust each other?

2) Goals 

Allies or lovers, who have no shared goals, are not realistic partners on a long–term basis. The dissolution of shared goals (divorce, business failure, or war) is the basis of strong plots. If one of your character steamrolls the rights of others to attain a shared goal, you have created a villain.

3) Struggle for control

This is universal to all relationships. If you doubt the statement, think about raising children or training a dog. These struggles, when mainly petty bickering, can add humor to fiction or can foreshadow a crisis. 

In She Didn't Know Her Place, the heroine, Dana Richardson, doesn't share the same goals as many of her colleagues at State U. Yes, she wants the university to enlarge its research portfolio but not at the cost of all ethics. She also wants to discover who killed Sally Stein. Most of her colleagues don't care. 

Think of your favorite fictional characters. How do they interact with others? Now think of your neighbors. Which are your favorites? Do they interact with others in a manner similar to the way your favorite characters interact with others?

Making Characters in Novels Realistic but Not Real

 All novelists have the urge occasionally to be bad and base a character in one of their books closely (very closely) on a friend, relative, or acquaintance. The threat of lawsuits and the potential loss of friends make most us regain our senses. However, quirks of some individuals could sell a novel.

How can novelists create dynamic, realistic characters without getting too real? Hopefully my observations will make you think. I suspect most of you would give an answer similar to mine but with different examples.

First off, I should note no character, except Bug, Sara Almquist’s Japanese Chin dog, in my novels is real. Bug (the character) is based on my own Japanese Chin Bug. He is a pet therapy dog and a black and white ball of fuzz who outsmarts me daily.    

Realistic title characters aren’t all good or all bad. Physicians in early medical mysteries and thrillers were either saintly, like Dr. Kildare, or evil, such as Dr. Moreau. Modern writers want to show a few warts in their lead characters.

However, I didn’t want to trivialize my lead character into being a dizzy snoop who clumsily forces her way into police investigations as occurs in some cozies. Come on, I can’t be the only reader who is flabbergasted at the stupidity (with moments of brilliance or luck) of some lead characters in cozy mysteries. I also didn’t want to produce another neurotic genius like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. Let’s face it most physicians and detectives aren’t geniuses; they’re normal people, albeit sometimes smarter or more observant than most.

Sara Almquist, the lead character in my medical thrillers Coming Flu and Ignore the Pain, is an epidemiologist. That profession gives her legitimate reasons to pry into everyone else’s business. She’s normal, but maybe a bit cranky and perhaps dotty about her dog Bug.

Most of the characters are amalgams of real people and fantasy. For example, the dean of the medical school in my medical mystery Murder: A New Way to Lose Weight is a polished, aloof gentleman, but he feels no remorse when he assigns his associate dean Linda tasks that all but turn her into cannon fodder. When I was an associate dean first the graduate school and then the medical school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I often compared notes with other associate deans. My dean in Murder: A New Way to Lose Weight in is a chimera of dozens of deans with a few flourishes thrown in.

Fantasy characters can participate in real scenes. Although I don’t base my characters on real people, some of my scenes are real. For example, I did climb over the roof of Iglesia de San Francisco in La Paz, Bolivia as Sara does in Ignore the Pain. Of course, my trek was leisurely; hers wasn’t.

When I consulted on science and public health issues in the Philippines, United Arab Emirates, and Beirut, I found that my attitudes about their challenges changed as I learned about their problems. In Ignore the Pain, I tried to capture the sights, sounds, and smells of poverty in Bolivia. I hoped my descriptions would be more effective than citing statistics, i.e. six percent of the children born in Bolivia die before their fifth birthday. I also tried to show the evolution of Sara’s and the other consultants’ attitudes and beliefs as they advised locals on complex, nuanced problems. For example, obviously cocaine is dangerous, but the chewing of coca leaves by miners in decrepit mines at thirteen thousand feet is understandable.

Now it’s your turn. How do you create realistic fictional characters?