Secondary Characters?

I think I am in a crazy mood tonight so you will just have to forgive me.

I have been puzzling about characters. Where do they come from?

How do we as authors (or daydreamers, or whatever) create them?

As I write my characters grow. In some ways that should be obvious, a novel would be fairly tedious if characters did not change with the progression of the plot.

But for me it almost feels like my characters shape the plots as I write.

I talked a while ago about Valentina, one of my characters in my WIP, forcing her way from a secondary character into prominence.

I have to say this is not the first time I have had this experience. In my first novel Veiled in Shadows two of my minor characters met and fell in love. It was a necessary plot device because those two characters being together meant two of my main characters could meet, but then sparks flew.

So how is it that the secondary characters shifted into prominence? Well in my first draft both characters Penny and Danny were present. Both had roles that were important to the plot but they never even met.

Yet by the time my final draft had been completed they had not only met. In fact it went much further, they had fallen in love and been married.

On the surface it made sense, the plot needed my main characters to be drawn together through a chance meeting. Logically it made more sense to me to have some of the characters already in the story bring them together, rather than creating new characters to use in one or two scenes.

So Danny Parnell and Penny Chesterfield were introduced. On the surface they did not seem at all matched. She was beautiful, elegant, educated and sophisticated. He awkward, not particularly good at anything and shy. Yet they fell madly in love with each other. (I will forgive myself that contrast. I have known many, many loving couples who seemed to have nothing in common).

As an author I have to take the blame. These characters sprang from my mind (at least I think they did). Yet it really seems like they were in charge. I’ll add a couple of points to show why -

I mean Penny and Danny? Would any self respecting author have a couple with such names. Daniel fine, Penelope fine but together?

And Penny Chesterfield becoming Penny Parnell, it is so alliterative as to be almost painful. Yet neither character would let me change their name once they were on the page.

I swear it was their choice not mine!

Have you ever created characters that took charge of your WIP?

Sunset and trees damaged in the 2009 Bushfires taken this evening with my new camera

Rambling Becomes a Sunday Habit and A Good Cause.

It’s Sunday again. Once again Deb and I have been homebound. Partly because the weather and partly because I had to both drop Io off at her work and pick her up.

Unlike last weekend I have barely been productive at all. I have thought a bit about my WIP but have barely put finger to keyboard.
I have spent a bit of time visiting blogs but all in all I have pretty much wasted my day.

However, while blog hopping I noticed Margot Kinberg is holding a charity raffle at her blog Confessions of a Mystery Novelist. Her raffle called Do the Write Thing is to raise funds for the New Zealand Red Cross to help victims of the Christchurch Earthquake.

What she wants is for Authors to donate copies of their book/s to use as prizes and for people to spread the word by posting or Tweeting about the raffle.
I’ve offered a copy of Veiled in Shadows and I am of course only too happy to do my bit to spread the word.

A piccie from my archive

A New Holland Honeyeater in the Rain

Now on with my ramble.
I am I think as ready as I can be for the job interview I have on Tuesday. Deb and I have run through questions we expect I’ll get and I’ve worked out responses.
Of course there are always surprises.

Deb and I finally picked out a present for Io’s impending 21st Birthday.
Deb took the opportunity to drop a few broad hints as her birthday is later in March.

Now I have said I haven’t done any writing but that is somewhat of a lie I have just spent half an hour tinkering with a section of my WIP featuring Valentina and Penelope.

So because I have been thinking about them an extract.
Valentina and Natasha have met Penelope at a canteen…

Valentina Meshcova
Berlin 1948
'I'll order us some tea, or perhaps you would prefer coffee?'
'No I'll order it, with my army identification I don't have to pay.'
Natasha piped up, ‘And something to eat!’
‘A glass of milk, you have to eat your supper in a while.’

As I stood at the counter waiting for the tea I casually watched my friend sitting at the table.
She laughed and tickled Natasha under her chin. She seemed to dote on the little one. But then like me Penelope must have been approaching thirty and like me she might never have children of her own. My friend leant close as Natasha explained what she had been drawing on a precious piece of paper with her favourite possession a little box of color pencils. How I had scoured the city to find her those pencils.

My friend, was it too soon to call her a friend? For six weeks I had known Penelope, but really for six days, Sundays.
Or more realistically for ten or twelve hours at a beach or in a meadow, or as now in a Soviet canteen for workers.
What did I know about her?
She didn't seem to work anywhere. She was well fed, well dressed for the ruin that was Berlin in the late 1940s and very beautiful.
Almost out of place really.
I pondered what I knew about her.
Apart from the fact that she had lost her husband in the war she had said nothing personal. Our conversation usually revolved around Natasha and the moment.
I shrugged off my doubts.
Perhaps it suited both of us to exist in the present.

With her beauty and her apparently privileged lifestyle she was probably what the Red Army termed a 'Campaign Wife'.
Some general's companion until he could return home.
If that was her situation I could easily accept she was coy about her circumstances.
I saw no shame in such a choice, I had seen too many corpses between Moscow and Berlin to any longer think antiquated morals should stand between a person and survival. But everyone’s idea of pride is different and perhaps pride held her from saying more.

Natasha, her face serious continued explaining her drawing.
As for me, I was happy to live in the moment.
I had no future mapped out, the war had taken my future.
And the past.
No one wanted to talk about the past.
I existed day to day.
But maybe, just maybe that was enough.

Penelope met my eye, her smile was warm. Something in that smile, that look, tickled my memory.
I had felt this about her before, it was stupid but I was sure I knew her from somewhere before.

But that was impossible.

I carefully carried the mugs of tea and a glass of milk back to the table.
'I have the strangest feeling about you.'
Penelope’s brows arched, her lovely smile again, 'What funny feeling?'
'I feel like… I feel I know you from somewhere else.'
'Yet we never met before that day at the lake.'
'No, but...'
'Maybe I remind you of someone else?'