Who are your characters?

It goes without saying that plot and character go hand-in-hand.  The central character or characters that you choose should be the best for your story and the best way of telling that story.  This raises the linked question of narration.  Should you go for an omniscient narrative voice or a first-person narrator?  Using the former, means that you can float God-like above the action and go anywhere you want, dipping in and out of each character’s mind.  A first-person narrator, by contrast, can only tell your reader what they’ve seen or experienced themselves unless they’ve got it second-hand from someone else.  A life-or-death situation described by an omniscient narrator can go either way.  A first-person narrator recalling what happened after the event is likely to have survived!  I’m sure there are literary exceptions to this rule but you know what I mean.  I like using a first-person narrator for the wholly lazy reason that I don’t have to know as much as I would if were claiming to be omniscient.  In essence, the details can be naturally sketchier and more impressionistic if filtered through a character’s description of them.

Can you be the central character?  Is lightly-disguised autobiography okay?  Of course, as long as anyone who might recognise themselves, as a result, isn’t hugely offended to the point that they can sue you.  Writers can be a bit like vampires – we draw on those around us to provide the lives for our characters.  If you know a novelist, you’ve probably appeared in one of their novels or short stories, whether you realise it or not.  People have written whole reference works on who the real person is behind the fictional character.  The most obvious and least disguised are probably Alice Liddell, the Alice of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and of course A A Milne’s son Christopher Robin in the Pooh bear stories.  Other real people have been the inspiration for famous characters without being so instantly recognisable – like Max Gerlach, the supposed basis for Jay Gatsby or the brilliant Scottish surgeon Dr Joseph Bell, whom Conan Doyle himself later acknowledged as the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes.  For my own part, I’m happy to confess that Mac Mackstead in BAGMAN is broadly based upon the late Ollie Halsall, a brilliant guitarist who is much less famous than his talent deserved.  My interest in his life long-predated my writing of the novel – it was almost as though I was looking around for a story in which to place him.

Whatever happens in your story, the reader needs to care about it – and that means that they must care about your central characters.  Whatever they do, they must be people that your reader wants to spend time with.  Equally, they must hate the bad guys.  I know that already makes it sound as simple (even simplistic) as a children’s story – but the truth is that all storytelling throughout history has relied on the same simple ingredients: a good and intriguing plot involving characters we care about.  And that’s it.  Not a whole lot more to say. 

Now I realise that I haven’t been much help.  There are huge numbers of books and online articles about the process of character creation but no-one can really tell you, me included, who your characters are because…they’re yours.  And who knows?  One of them might be sitting opposite you right now.