For the blog tour I’m doing in connection with publication of my new thriller, She Knew Too Much, one of the bloggers asked an intriguing question. Do I ever feel like my characters are taking over or that I’m always in charge?
People do talk about characters taking the reins of the story and steering it off into unexpected directions, but I’d never thought about that actually happening in my writing. Reflecting on the question, though, I realized that may be partly a result of the way I work. I’m what they call a “pantser,” which means I write by the seat of my pants. I let the story grow organically, rather than plotting everything out in advance and channeling my characters into predetermined actions and results. Even though characters come out of my own head and you might think I’m directing the action like a puppeteer, in fact, for the characters to be realistic, at times they have to do something unexpected. Unexpected, even by me—in the sense of “unplanned.”
A good example is the relationship between the two main characters in She Knew Too Much—an American travel writer named Genie Clarke who gets into trouble in Rome and a Polizia di Stato Detective, Leo Angelini. Leo and Genie are obviously attracted to each other, but will they get together? I didn’t decide that beforehand, I let them work it out. They were both so preoccupied with keeping Genie safe from the mafiosi pursuing her and stopping the plot the mafia is trying to hatch, a relationship between them was never a slam-dunk. As in real life, a lot can interfere.
My approach is to develop the characters and, when they are thrust into a situation, I ask myself, “what would a person like this, with their unique attributes, do in these circumstances?” In fact, the ways they surprise me are one of the joys of writing!
It takes a bit of writing to get to know my characters well enough to understand how they would behave in certain situations. I couldn’t possibly know that beforehand. Then the job is to set up believable scenarios that let them be who they are, for better or worse.
In She Knew Too Much, several characters do the worst possible thing or come to the worst possible conclusions at every turn, sometimes to humorous effect. These hapless people are fun to write too!
I can’t say enough about how much I appreciate the welcoming blog hosts and the early reviewers of She Knew Too Much. The book is available from Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and elsewhere.