Nice to meet you...

[John Dean]

As I have said in previous blogs, writers can create the finest landscapes, devise the greatest stories and produce the most remarkable prose but they cannot make their narrative truly live unless they have devised effective characters.

This comes to mind at this specific time because I am busy creating new characters to appear alongside members of the regular ‘cast’ in the new DCI John Blizzard novel. Readers of the series engage with the regulars (hopefully!) but the arrival of new people injects added interest.

The first thing a writer has to bear in mind is that every character, established or new, has a job to do within the story, making things happen, imparting information, allowing other characters to react to them etc. If they do not have a job to do then they don’t really deserve a place in the book.

Characters should also be realistic (unless you are writing over-the-top comedy where stereotypes can sometimes work) because your reader should feel that your characters are so real that they can actually walk into the room.

When creating a character, a writer has a number of tools to bring him or her to life, including describing what they look like and how they move but the author will also try to get into their head - how do they think, how do they view the world?

It also helps in the case of a significant character to have them keep secrets which are revealed as the story progresses, which is very helpful in crime fiction, of course.

Good writers will also bear in mind that minor characters are important, too, so it’s worth taking a little time to develop those that warrant it. Sometimes, they can develop into more significant characters and change the direction of a novel.

Also vital to the creation of characters of substance is conflict, which is important because stories need things to happen and that usually comes out of conflict - characters arguing, fighting, feuding etc.

It is through seeing characters in conflict that we see them at their truest, when their guard is down, when they are fighting for what really matters to them. It shows their personality in its truest form.

Conflict also helps the writer take the story on: a school is to be closed, two friends fall out, a community is torn apart by an event. All these types of conflict are more provide rich hunting grounds for the writer.

There’s a lot to think about but perhaps the most important function a new  character performs for an author is to keep them creative and interested in their stories as they find out what the person they have invented is actually like. Many a writer will tell you that they ended up being surprised by what they discovered!

You can purchase previous Blizzard novels either individually in e-book or paperback format or brought together in e-book anthologies on Amazon, all published by The Book Folks. Some are also in audio book format.