Credible Crime Characters

A story about every-day people doing ordinary things in usual ways in regular places does not make good fiction. In order to captivate my readers, I generally make at least one of the following extraordinary: my characters, plots, settings, or action.

My upcoming novella, SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT,* pits a very ordinary housewife against a bizarre and challenging situation. However, because I am a people-watcher and have psychiatric training, it’s usually my characters that get endowed with ‘extraordinariness’. As wonderful as I feel my characters are, I must employ special writing techniques to ensure my readers fall for these bizarre characters, bond with them, sympathize and empathize with them, and ultimately care about what happens to them.

Making that job easier is the fact that in real life, human behavior is notoriously unpredictable, inexplicable, and at times, unbelievable. Even to the professionals who study the human psyche, the connection between mind, emotion, behavior, and circumstance is tenuous at best. Human motives are often hidden, generally ill-understood, and seemingly irrational.

Despite that reality, readers need to understand characters and find them believable in order to enjoy their stories. Credible characters are more important to certain genres, such as Crime Fiction. Many read crime novels to challenge their intellect, to match wits with the authors, and to solve the crime or guess the ending before they reach the last page—enjoyable goals that can be unattainable if the story is not written with an air of realism.

Following are a few techniques I’ve found useful to create credible crime characters.

Manipulate the character’s age. For example, the ultra-intelligent, very short, extremely rich, and extraordinarily beautiful heroine of my soon-to-be released e-novel THE TRAZ is only 13 years old. Because of Katrina’s tender age, her life remains exceptionally challenging despite her superior talents —this vulnerability improves her likeability and believability. Additionally, because she is a child, readers feel disinclined to judge her harshly or to question her extraordinary talents.

To further ‘humanize’ her, I surround Katrina with ordinary people—forcing her to interact with characters whose attitudes, abilities, and actions are familiar to my readers.

Although I used youth to increase Katrina’s believability, an equally effective way to create a bond between extraordinary characters and readers is to endow a character (either the main character or a secondary character) with old age and wisdom. Katrina’s grandparents serve this role in THE TRAZ. Because readers find it difficult to argue with the wisdom of elders, they will generally accept as credible the edicts or pronunciations that come from the crone, the ancient wizard, or the tribal elder.

Wise secondary characters often disappear as the story winds up, thus preventing main characters (and readers) from questioning their edicts. As a reader, I’m prone to believe that magic exists (at least for the duration of the novel) if the wise wizard says it does. Ancient texts, dream demons, and traditional or religious lore are some other powerful and respected things that writers often call on to enforce believability. Assigning characters esteemed professions sometimes works well, too.

And finally, writers often encourage readers to bond with their strange characters by having those characters question their unnatural and/or extraordinary abilities. We are all familiar with the heroine who doubts she really can read minds, the man who trembles on the cliff edge, afraid he can’t really fly, or the hero who thinks he’s gone insane when he finds himself living in medieval times.

For a further discussion on research and credibility, I invite you to visit http://eileenschuh.blogspot.com
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*SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT will be released by traditional publisher, WolfSinger Publications, in both ebook and print formats in August 2011.

THE TRAZ will be released as a self-published ebook in Spring 2011.

Credible Crime Fiction

Last year on Criminal Minds at Work, I blogged about using news headlines for research and inspiration. However, there are many other fun ways to dig out the facts that lend credence to fiction.

I’ve participated in some hot debates on writers’ forums about whether or not fiction needs to be credible. Some readers are quite willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of a good story. Others are turned off by the slightest anachronism. I imagine editors are likewise split on the issue. Some genres, such as fantasy (and often romance) commonly break the boundary of commonsense, while others such as historical and crime fiction seem to appeal to a more critical and rational readership. So, while a superhero in a fantasy novel might leap tall buildings in a single bound, readers don’t want a forest ranger hauling a body out of the water into his canoe. (Oh, oh….tipsy! Rescuer better know how to swim.)

Of everything I’ve learned about researching for fiction, the best advice I received was to write the story so skillfully that, factual or not, it's believable. I obviously need to work on that skill as I’ve had editors question the believability of my stories, even though they have been thoroughly researched. *sigh* Sometimes truth is just stranger than fiction.

One of the best sources of information for my novels is simply life, itself. I’ve bought life insurance so I know the payout can bypass the estate and be paid directly to the beneficiary (or the minor beneficiary’s appointed trustee) within days of death. So, when my young heroine needs a quick cash injection to buy her way into the drug world, I kill off her parents.

A while back, I looked into opening a savings account for my new grandson. I discovered it is very easy to open juvenile bank accounts—accounts without limits and to which adults in the kid’s life have no access.  That little fact added depth and conflict to my story. (THE TRAZ)

The course on firearms arms safety that enabled me to get my Possession and Acquisition Licence was a rich source of information on guns. (Did you know the word “bullet” is often misused? Depending on the circumstance, “cartridge” or “shell” might be the correct word.)

My varied education, careers, and travels have given me a wealth of knowledge and experiences. As has motherhood, business ownership, and grocery shopping. I know that snow crunches beneath my boots, that two-wheeled vehicles are not allowed outside urban centres in South Korea, and that peonies usually bloom in June.

Paying attention to the details of your life, engaging people in conversation, and asking lots and lots of questions of everybody you meet will pay off big time when you finally settle in to write.

Happy New Year to all my fans, friends, and family. 2011 is definitely going to be a great year for me—I’ll see the release of my first published novel!

Schrödinger’s Cat, a traditionally published psychological crime thriller spanning two universes, will be out in both print and ebook formats in August. As well, I’m planning to release a self-published ebook, The Traz, the prequel to my Back Tracker crime series.

Until next time, keep writing the wrongs.
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Coming Soon….

So much for making the plot believable, how can one ensure the characters are?

For further discussion on the role of facts in fiction, check out Magic of the Muses
http://eileenschuh.blogspot.com

Eileen Schuh, Author
"Schrödinger’s Cat"
http://www.eileenschuh.com