Karla Stover is visiting and talking about Creating Characters #BWLAuthor #MFRWAuthor #Characters #Heroes #Heroines #Villains

 

2. Heroes, Heroines, Villains. Which are your favorite to write? LOL, grammer check says this s/b “which are your favorites. . .”

I like creating the secondary characters i.e. friends of the heroine. With them, I can be loser about their dialogue, appearance, quirks, etc. Recently, a friend asked me to put her in a book so she is in chapter 1 of the novel on which I’m currently working. I had a friend who sold a “name mention,” apparently that’s a fairly common practice.

3. Heroes. How do you find them? Do pictures, real life or plain imagination create the man you want every reader to love? Do they come before the plot or after you have the idea for the story?

Heroes are tough and I generally try to think what a famous hunk would do / say / or look like. For dog’s years I thought Harrison Ford was the absolute bee’s knees. Sadly, for both of us, he got too old, so I switched allegiance to Brad Pitt. Then I saw him wearing some sort of khaki skirt and it was sayonara Brad. After binge-watching Sons of Anarchy, I grew mighty attached to Charlie Hunnam - - except for the facial hair: not my thing. In the book I’m working on now, I want my hero to have a smile as cute as that of Rob Morrow in Northern Exposure. I doubt if my readers love my guys but my heroines do and that’s what counts.

4. Heroines. How do you find them? Do pictures, real life or imagination create the woman you want the reader to root for? Do they appear before the plot or after you have the idea for the story?

I like a heroine with at least one special interest. Pursuing that interest then leads her to situations. I love to read old newspapers and write my characters into what was actually happening in the appropriate town at the appropriate time. In Mr. Singer’s Seamstress, she’s, well duh, a seamstress. In Seamstress’s prequel, A Feather For a Fan, she’s a baker, and in the sequel to it, the heroine is a photographer. The setting for these three books is Tacoma, WA, first in 1878, next in 1883 and now circa 1917, and in addition to newspapers, I’ve been studying early photography techniques. However, my most recent book, Parlor Girls, takes place mostly in Chicago where the heroines are brothel madams. The way I write is that I start creating a setting and the heroine comes along.

However, for both heroines and heroes, I find giving them appropriate names—ones that feel real to me as I write is the most difficult part. Not even the “Name Your Characters” websites help. Right now, my hero is named Will but I’m finding it uncomfortable for some reason. I was watching TV the other day and one of the men was named Rikus. I looked the name up and a man named Rikus plays a key role in a series called Kingdom Hearts. I don’t know the series but I like the name and I think I’m going to use it.

Your favorite book?

One favorite book? An impossible task. If I’m sad, I read Betty McDonald’s books, The Egg and I, for example, but especially Anybody Can Do Anything. If I want something weighty and well-researched, I like Forever Amber. Right now, I’m ploughing through Elizabeth Goudge’s A Child From the Sea and for something a little lighter (not to mention a larger font,) The Widows of Malabar Hill. I could go on; in our car is Helen Rappaport’s Caught in the Revolution, in the truck is A Nurse in the Army of the Tsar, and in the bathroom is the baseball book that caused such a brouhaha, Ball Four. Wherever I am, it’s best to be prepared.

5. Villains or villainesses or an antagonist, since they don’t always have to be the bad guy or girl. They can be a person opposed to the hero’s or heroine’s obtaining their goal. How do you choose one? How do you make them human?

I have an actual bad-guy in Mr. Singer’s Seamstress but that was a fluke. Generally, what I have are personality conflicts. Doesn’t everyone have friends who bug them? It’s a hoot to create snarky characters.

 6. What is your latest release? Who is the hero, heroine and or the villain?

Parlor Girls is my latest book. When I first learned about the Everleigh sisters, Ada and Minna, their rags-to-riches story, their world-famous brothel and genteel retirement I was fascinated. There don’t appear to be any definitive biographies about them so I read and researched to make the two, their “employees,” the local competition, (their only real villains,) and politicians as accurate as I could. Rather quickly I found that the more I looked at old photographs and newspaper articles, the more “you might like this” emails I received. It might not be big brother who is watching but retailers, Pinterest and spammers sure are.

7. What are you working on now?

During World War 1, a local girl went to war as a camouflage artist. This piqued me interest so I researched her, but more interesting to me was the work done by the Women's Reserve Camouflage Corps of which I knew nothing. I subscribe to a newspaper service which gives me access to old papers nation-wide. When I started my current book (and I wish I had a name for it) I had Louise, my heroine, testing a camouflage tarp she made.

 8. How can people find you?

Facebook, mostly. I have an Insta account but have yet to post on it. I looked at it a few minutes go and saw that I have 4 followers. How delightfully strange is that?

 9. Who are your favorite authors?

Ha! Most of them are dead. The afore-mentioned Betty McDonald and Lucy Maud Montgomery, but I just discovered James McBride and Simone St. James. McBride is a black author and sometimes his conversations, actions and descriptions are a struggle for me. St. James writes the best ghost stories I’ve read since I read The Uninvited (a good book and a good movie.) I binge-read all her books and have a library reserve on the newest. Our library system doesn’t have all of McBride’s books but I’m reading what they do have.