(5 Tips for Giving Your Character Powers.)

The primary level of secondary characters are those who are most important to the life of the sleuth, and therefore the plot. The best supporting role at the Oscars! The romantic interest, the villain, the possessive mother. We need to know a lot about them because we need to understand their motivation. Is the boyfriend worthy of her love, why does the villain want revenge? It really helps if we can picture them clearly and hear their voices too.

In my new book, Mrs. Endicott’s Splendid Adventure, my heroine is dumped by her husband and flees to the South of France with two women who have both been treated unjustly by society. We come to know a great deal about all three women by the end of the book as they interact with the heroine and with those around them.

Then at the level below that, we have characters with whom they will interact with in the French village. Characters important enough to the plot that we need to know who they are, some of their back story, and what drives them. Once a character betrays the heroine. We find out why, but we don’t know everything about him.

Below these are those who would be the extras in a movie: the baker in the village, the priest, the doctor. They are just cameo appearances and therefore we don’t need to go too deeply into describing them. We don’t need to know what motivates the baker to make bread. But we must take pains to make sure they are more than cardboard stereotypes: The Irish Cop. The wicked stepmother, the rough edged waitress with the heart of gold.

If you see each of them as an individual, your story will be fresher. Think Harry Potter and the secondary characters—the individual professors and students, Harry’s uncle and aunt. All real people that we feel we know well.

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So how do we create real people when we don’t want to give up too much of the page to describe them? Our first impression of a person is usually visual, although it could be auditory like an annoying laugh across the room or someone who can’t stop sneezing.

1. Try to find something about them that encapsulates them. Think of a party in a room where we know nobody. As we look around, some people catch our eye and stand out. That woman is wearing too much make-up and trying to look younger than she is. That elderly man has dyed his hair black and it doesn’t go with his too pale skin and eyebrows. That woman talks with her hands. Is she Italian? That too tall boy stoops because he’s self conscious.
2. They come to life through their dialogue, especially when they interact with the main character. When we first meet them, are they rude, curt, witty, flirtatious? Do they like to talk about themselves? Are they hesitant, shy, feeling out of place? Menacing, spooky? Their dialogue also helps to anchor the story in time and place. If the heroine has moved to a new environment, it is the characters she meets who will show us what that new place is all about, by the way they talk, act, move, dress.
3. They reveal themselves through their gestures, mannerisms, the way they walk. The woman sitting at the restaurant table scratching lines on the tablecloth with her fork is clearly tense. Why? Another man is gulping down his food. As a writer, take time to observe when you are stuck in an airport, or waiting for your food.
4. Names are important. Once you have the name, you know the character. Sometimes I will have called a character Robert for 50 pages and things are going slowly. Then out of the blue he’ll say “Why do you keep calling me Robert when my name is Richard?” And then the story just leaps ahead. 
5. Once you have introduced them, their character will be revealed not only by the way they speak and act but by the way the main character interacts with them or observes them. You will come to know them as she does.
6. With secondary characters, as with your main character, once you have created them it’s their story. Don’t try to force them to do things it’s not within their nature to do. Allow yourself to be surprised if they say or do something unexpected. In every book, at least one of my characters surprises me and goes on to play a role I hadn’t expected. Be open to that. It makes the story much richer and more real.
7. Hint: Only give up precious time and space to those who will further the story for us. We don’t need to know that the policeman holding up the traffic when the heroine is in a desperate hurry is tall, ginger haired with a little mustache. Not important.
8. Another Hint: Don’t introduce us to too many characters at once. You confuse the reader.
9. And a last hint: If you really want to understand a character, write a paragraph in their first person. You’ll be surprised at what they want to tell you.

My whole aim when I write about another time and place is to take the reader there, not tell them about it. And it’s the secondary characters who will make this world real.

Check out Rhys Bowen’s Mrs. Endicott’s Splendid Adventure here:

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The small town I live in now is a wonderful community. Each day someone says or does something at the convenience store, the post office, or elsewhere that I will use in a novel. But it is in the more meaningful close relationships in them that lead to complex and nuanced characters on the page with a specificity found in real genuine exchanges. 

A few years ago, I volunteered to coach my seven-year-old son’s Little League team. I’d never coached at any level and was in over my head. So was the other father who volunteered for the first time. We quickly learned that wrangling a dozen seven-year-olds on weeknights when the kids, and we, were exhausted is not easy, even for a Detective-Lieutenant of the Major Crimes Unit who oversees all homicides across Vermont, which the other father is. We’d never met before, but soon learned each other’s careers. He: the state’s lead homicide detective. Me: a “crime writer.” 

As we struggled together with the learning curve of coaching kids, we became friends. I’d ask about his job and he began to offer me ideas for good crime novel plots. I’d ask how to handle a certain murder case in a book and he gave me the answers. What I learned from him was invaluable. Not just procedure and the law, but about him as a father and husband, a high school soccer game emcee, youth baseball coach, and a homicide detective who sees the ugliest side of human behavior.  

One Friday night after a practice, our families were heading to the parking lot and he said, “See you at the game tomorrow.” But before we got in our vehicles he got a call, said a few words, and hung up. He wouldn’t be able to coach the next day. He’d been called to a murder investigation. His daughter was upset, his wife was disappointed. The murder had taken place hours away in northern Vermont. He had to head out straight away. He had a go bag ready in his truck. It was a three-hour drive north to the crime scene, and once he got there he would spend several, 16-hour days before he came home. His job meant leaving his family for an indeterminate amount of time, without notice, anytime at all times, whether it was 2 a.m. on Christmas Eve or while on vacation in Maine for the 4th of July.  

Another time when we were picking up our kids at school, he said he had to head out right after. When I said it must be hard dealing with violence and murder, he said what was hard right then was finding a babysitter for the next few days, and someone to pick his daughter up and drop her off at school because his wife’s schedule didn’t allow it. He had to find a mom and pop motel to stay in for three days up north in rural Vermont. It was supposed to snow hard, making a three-hour drive a treacherous five-hour drive.  

These, and many more practical real-life considerations inform how I write detectives now. I have a genuine insight into the pragmatic and emotional challenges and stresses, and the coping skills needed to navigate them and a family and small-town life. It’s not even information you can get in an interview and definitely not by just doing research. It’s made my characters richer and more realistic. 

When I was working on the early draft of Remote: The Six, my novel that’s out now, a friend asked me casually about it and I told him it involved FBI agents and I had no clue what I was doing regarding the FBI. Well, he had a friend who knew two career FBI special agents. He set it up for us to speak. They are a married couple with long careers as Special Agents. I was very fortunate. They spent hours on the phone with me and answered every question I had about their profession, from the gear and weaponry used to surveil and swarm a house in very specific situations, to chain of command, warrants and flak jackets, hi-tech surveillance and going undercover, and what their ordinary family lives are like and how their careers impact them, and how real life impacts their careers. Without randomly talking to this friend one day, I’d never have found these two particular agents who were so generous and specific. They made Lukas Stark, the FBI agent and protagonist of Remote, authentic and believable in a way I could never have done with my imagination or online research.  

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Another, darker, instance where community gave me insight into believable characters was when a close childhood friend robbed a Denver bank at gunpoint and fled in his vehicle. He was chased by a CNN helicopter and the police. This was the late 1980s. It was the first live fugitive chase in history. While I was watching it unfold, I had no idea the fugitive was my friend. He ran down and killed an officer going 80 MPH, then crashed his vehicle. He attempted to kidnap a mother and her baby and commandeer her car but she got away as he fired his handgun at her. He took an elderly man hostage and had him drive. The helicopter eventually cornered the truck in a parking lot and my friend was shot 13 times and killed, on live TV.  

I had no idea this was my friend until after he was killed and they showed his mugshot and said his name. He’d escaped a Texas prison where he was serving a life sentence for kidnapping. I had no idea about that either. This friend had always been an easy going, charming, and funny teenager when I knew him. A good friend. Generous and down to earth. Athletic and handsome. Ever since then, I’ve explored what happens along the way to turn some people to violence and crime.  

In this case, I learned a traumatic and horrific event happened to him regarding his father’s suicide before he moved to our neighborhood. This stuck with me my whole life. It gives me great insight into how I write certain criminals whose backgrounds are traumatic and very hard to escape, who would not be criminals at all if not for that trauma that triggered it years prior.  

Every day, everywhere we writers go in our communities, the people we meet, every friend and co-worker and stranger, every fellow citizen is an opportunity to discover how a person’s voice and mannerisms and beliefs and appearance can help create realistic and nuanced characters to inhabit the communities in your fiction. 

The post The Character Next Door: How to Tap Into Relationships and Communities to Create Realistic Characters appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(Find more Killer Writers conversations here.)

“James, one of the things that stood out to me in FDR Drive was how fairly you treated every character, regardless of their role. As a reader, I felt like I could understand why someone acted a certain way, even when I disagreed with them. What guides you when tackling contested spaces like this?”

“The starting point for me is looking back at the hard questions I dealt with as FBI Director and as a federal prosecutor. Those were moments where you had to recognize that good people can disagree sharply about serious questions. In FDR Drive, I drew from that experience to explore one of the tensions I grappled with in government: Where does free speech end and a crime begin? In a country that cherishes its First Amendment, when someone uses words to incite others to harm, how do we respond? That tension became central to the story. The challenge is finding a path between two deeply held values: free expression and the need to protect innocent people. To write about that authentically, I had to focus on the people: What do they fear? What do they justify to themselves? What compromises have shaped their character? That’s what gives a scene its weight.”

“That came across clearly. The characters felt three‑dimensional because you gave space for both sides. What role does empathy play when you write characters with opposing motivations, especially when one side might be doing things you disagree with?”

“Empathy is everything when you write about contested ideas. What has long scared me about being human is how easily we can fall in love with our own virtue. In law school, one of the most valuable lessons I learned came from Professor Hans Tiefel, a German-American ethicist. Even before I went to law school, I took one of his classes in college. He would force us to write essays and give oral arguments for positions we disagreed with, ensuring we met the facts fairly and presented the opposing side with precision and honor. That lesson shaped me as a lawyer and, later, as a writer. The best lawyers understand that their role isn’t just to win an argument; it’s to serve the larger ideal of a fair system. You must passionately advocate for one side and then be able to turn around and passionately advocate for the other. It’s humbling, and it’s a lesson that applies beyond the law. In fiction, it means putting yourself in the character’s shoes, seeing the world as they do, and presenting their motivations as honestly as possible.”

“That approach came through clearly. Even when one character is acting reprehensibly, you gave readers space to grapple with why. How do you balance making both sides compelling when one side might be overtly acting out of cruelty, greed, or hate?”

“The line between good and evil doesn’t run between people. It runs down the center of every human heart. I’ve worked with people who committed horrific acts. One witness I remember had killed 25 people for the Sicilian Mafia, almost all by strangulation. At first, I thought, ‘How monstrous.’ Yet, after hours and hours across a table from him, I learned about his deep love for his wife and how much he grieved for the pain he’d caused his children. Those moments don’t justify what he did, but they reveal that we’re complex creatures, a mix of wounds and convictions. In fiction, I try to capture that complexity. Not to excuse behavior, but to acknowledge that every person you write is shaped by forces that matter deeply to them. When a character justifies themselves, when you can imagine how their choices felt necessary to them, that character can live beyond the page.”

“That’s an intriguing lens. Do you ever worry about nudging readers too hard toward a specific viewpoint? How do you guard against making a character an extension of your own beliefs?”

“It’s one of the biggest dangers for any writer, especially when dealing with controversial or polarizing ideas. It’s tempting to write a character in a way that serves your worldview, making it a mouthpiece for what you already think. To guard against that, I have built in accountability. My wife reads every scene as I write it, and she has an uncanny sense for when I’ve fallen too much in love with one character or flattened another. My kids do the same. They’ll tell me when a character doesn’t sound like themselves anymore, when one voice is starting to sound like another, or when one character’s motivations seem too convenient. That external feedback is vital. It’s humbling, and it reminds me that every character deserves to stand on their own. The goal isn’t to win an argument or justify a position. The goal is to present a scene as authentically as I can and let readers draw their own conclusions.”

“That’s incredibly valuable for writers. Let’s talk about the process for a moment. You mentioned drawing from lived experience when creating certain characters. How consciously do you lean into those moments when plotting a scene?”

“Very consciously. The witness I mentioned earlier inspired one of the central characters in FDR Drive. When I write those moments, I close my eyes and try to remember how it felt to be across the table from him. What were the moments that revealed vulnerability? What about him felt monstrous? What felt heartbreakingly human? That approach gives a scene a charge. I’m not inventing conflict from nowhere; I’m recreating dynamics I’ve witnessed, and that gives readers a chance to grapple with those tensions themselves. It’s fiction, but it’s rooted in lived experience, which makes it feel more authentic.”

Check out James Comey’s FDR Drive here:

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“That’s evident throughout the book. Do you find that knowing those moments personally gives you more latitude when tackling morally ambiguous situations?”

“Definitely. It allows for specificity. When I picture a scene, I can draw on gestures, moments of silence, or unexpected reactions that shaped the experience for me. This doesn’t mean mimicking reality beat for beat, but it means allowing that lived experience to deepen the emotional core of the scene. For writers tackling controversial or ambiguous topics, I always advise going closer, not further away. Too often, when writers want to grapple with challenging ideas, the instinct is to flatten people into caricatures: the bad guy or the corrupt one. Getting closer means allowing readers to witness moments that complicate that view. The closer you get, the harder it is for readers to dismiss a character as one thing, the harder it is for you, as the writer, to make that character a symbol rather than a person.”

“That’s such an important takeaway: Get closer, deepen the character. What about tackling contested ideas as a writer? In an increasingly polarized world, what’s your best piece of advice for writers trying to grapple with difficult issues?”

“Stay rooted in the lived reality of character. Whatever your topic, ask yourself, ‘How would this person justify themselves?’ Get as close as you can. Let the reader witness that internal process. And remember: It’s so easy and lazy to say, ‘Everyone who disagrees with me is an idiot or evil.’ It takes more work, more humility, to recognize that someone can disagree passionately with you and still operate from a place of conviction, shaped by their own experiences and understanding of the world. That doesn’t mean excusing behavior. It means understanding it. When you approach contested ideas with that lens, you write deeper stories and create moments that linger long after the book is closed.”

“That reminds me of a story you’ve shared before, about teaching a class called Policing Inside Out at Howard University. Could you talk about that? It feels relevant to how writers can grapple with contested ideas.”

“Absolutely. After I was fired from the FBI, I taught a class called Policing Inside Out at Howard University, a historically Black college. The class was intentionally structured to encourage students and active-duty police officers to engage with and grapple with contested ideas. We brought together 15 Howard undergraduates, almost all Black, and 15 active‑duty officers from Baltimore, Washington, and Charlotte. At the beginning of the semester, the two groups sat on opposite sides of the room, wary of one another. By the end, they were intermingled, openly sharing stories, challenging assumptions, and grieving the end of that time together. They didn’t necessarily agree by the final day, but they came to understand each other as human beings shaped by their own worlds and struggles. That experience captures the core lesson for writers: Getting closer doesn’t erase differences, but it makes understanding possible. And understanding makes for richer, more honest stories.”

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“That’s an extraordinary example. Let’s shift to character voice. You mentioned earlier how your wife or kids will alert you when character voices start sounding too alike. What have you learned about keeping character voices distinct?”

“It’s an ongoing challenge. When you spend a long time with a character, it’s easy for their voice to bleed into another’s, especially when you’re deep into drafting and moving quickly between scenes. That’s where readers and editors you trust are vital. My wife, for example, will leave a comment like, ‘This doesn’t sound like Matty Parker anymore. This sounds like your other character.’ Those moments force me to slow down and reread aloud. The sound of a character’s voice, the rhythm, the word choice, and the worldview embedded in their lines are like a fingerprint. Getting that right takes time, and it takes listening. The lesson for writers is to revisit character voices frequently and to seek help from trusted readers. It’s easy to lose track when you’re deep in the scene, but the voice is the character. It’s worth getting right.”

“That’s great advice. Let’s talk about endings for a moment. As a writer, how do you balance making an ending feel both authentic and satisfying, especially when dealing with morally ambiguous stories?”

“It’s a hard question, and one I continue to grapple with. In an earlier book, I left the ending intentionally ambiguous, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions about a character and their choices. In FDR Drive, I gave more concrete closure because it felt right for that character and that moment. Different readers want different things from an ending. Some want a hard stop, a sense that the character has arrived at a concrete destination. Others want an open door, a hint that the questions don’t end when the book does. What guides me is the character and the scene itself. What does this character need? What does this scene require? Will this ending linger? Will it reside in a reader long after they’ve put down the book? That’s the measure I use. Whatever the form, an ending must stay with the reader, long after they’ve finished reading.”

“That lingering quality is one of the things I admired most about FDR Drive. For writers grappling with contested ideas, especially in a time when readers can be quick to judge, what final thought would you leave them with?”

“Get closer. Stay curious. Resist the lazy instinct to flatten people into caricatures. Let your characters justify themselves and trust your readers to draw their own conclusions. It can be exhausting to grant someone the benefit of the doubt, to imagine the best case for a worldview you reject. But it’s worth it. The stories that linger, the stories that matter, are those that honor the complexity of being human. If you can do that, if you can recognize that every person, every character, operates with a mix of convictions, wounds, fears, and loyalties, you can write stories that live beyond the page.”

_____________________________

James Comey has been a prosecutor, defense lawyer, general counsel, teacher, writer, and leader. He most recently served in government as Director of the FBI. He has written two bestselling nonfiction books, A Higher Loyalty and Saving Justice, as well as three novels in his Nora Carleton crime fiction series. https://jamescomeybooks.com/

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(The Power of Love Stories.)

Seriously, more men should be reading rom-coms if they want to find out how to properly court the young lady they are interested in. In my rom-com Writing Mr. Right, Ziya does not necessarily write her own Mr. Right, but I’m going to explain what makes a Mr. Right in romantic fiction, and how I went about making Aashiq, her love interest, a Mr. Right.

Mr. Right knows how to communicate.

Let’s be real: There’s a reason the miscommunication trope is among the top five most hated tropes in romantic fiction. Sometimes adults can have a hard time expressing themselves; it happens to the best of us. But if a grown man goes a whole book not being able to tell the protagonist how he feels, even once, that’s when it becomes frustrating. Mr. Right should be able to talk about how the protagonist makes him feel, and as an added bonus, if it’s because being with the protagonist makes him believe like he can finally speak openly, then you’re cooking with all the right spices.

In Writing Mr. Right, Aashiq is all about communication: He says everything he thinks and feels, because to him, what’s the point of existence if you just hold everything back? But when it comes to the deeper stuff, like sensitive emotions he hasn’t grappled with before, that’s where Ziya comes in and gently encourages him to make room for those feelings, and in turn, it helps her learn how to communicate with him too.

Mr. Right knows what you need without needing to ask.

Protagonists typically carry a lot of burden. Whether it be internal issues they need to work through, like feeling misunderstood or like they’re not worthy, or external issues, like dealing with an overbearing boss and an intrusive family. Sometimes, you don’t know how to ask for things. This is where Mr. Right steps in—whether it’s with something like showing up to her doorstep with takeout, giving her a hug when she’s crashing out, or even just offering to be an impartial ear for her to vent to. Mr. Right will be someone who can take one look at the protagonist and know in an instant what they need.

In Writing Mr. Right, Aashiq does a lot of things without asking Ziya—often to her detriment, but when it comes to figuring out what she needs, there’s no better expert than him. After all, who’s gonna know you better than the physical manifestation of your artistry?

Mr. Right has to be hot.

Okay, is this one superficial? Maybe. Do I still mean it? Absolutely. But what works about having a Mr. Right who is hot is that it can mean anything, because attraction is subjective. Some people find six packs hot; others find them gaudy. Some people salivate over tall, dark, and handsome; others would rather die than be near someone who could walk into the audition room for a romantasy screen adaptation and land the role on the spot. And don’t get me started on the controversy of blond men. But no matter what attracts you, Mr. Right should have qualities that your protagonist thirsts after. That could be hair black as the shadows, cheekbones that are so sharp it can cut someone, or a lean body that they can wrap themselves up in.

And when I say “hot” can mean anything, I also mean physical attraction isn’t the only aspect at play. For those who don’t experience physical attraction, as long as Mr. Right has a good personality, that can be considered “hot” too. A man who can make you laugh? Hot. A man who demonstrates reliability? Smoking. A man who knows how to communicate his feelings? Call the fire department, because I’ve just burst into flames. Yeah, okay, the bar is in hell, but that’s what romantic fiction is for.

In Writing Mr. Right, Ziya finds Aashiq physically attractive, but his upbeat personality in comparison to her own pessimism is a turn off. That is, until she starts to see the world in the same way he does, and that’s when her attraction meter ramps right up.

Click to continue.

Mr. Right is just pure stinkin’ cute.

Make no mistake; there is a difference between “hot” and “pure stinkin’ cute.” “Hot” is everything I described above. “Pure stinkin’ cute” is when Mr. Right does something that makes you kick your feet and cackle to yourself like an old witch in bed at two a.m. after you told yourself “one more chapter” 10 chapters ago. I’m talking Mr. Darcy hand clench levels of stinkin’ cute. I’m talking about when he finally calls her by her first name after spending the entire book calling her by her last name. I’m talking about when he kisses her for the first time and then later on admits that he’d been wanting to do that for a long time. I’m talking about “you came” and “you called.” I don’t know about the rest of you, but I need a Mr. Right who is down horrendous for his leading lady, like all he has to do is think of her and he’s in the trenches. This especially hits in rivals to lovers and enemies to lovers, and it hits even harder when you can pinpoint the exact moment Mr. Right folds.

In Writing Mr. Right, Aashiq is the sweetest love interest I have ever written. I wanted him to be inspiring, uplifting, and overall, a huge Loverboy. One of my personal favorite feet-kicking moments is when he helps Ziya put on a cardigan, and he automatically sweeps her hair out of the way, so it won’t get caught between her shirt and the cardigan. It’s such a delicious and intimate gesture, and it’s just so stinkin’ cute.

Above all, a Mr. Right should always end with a for me.

In romance, it can mean multiple things. It can mean the singular love interest is who your protagonist ends up with, even if the reader thinks the protagonist is better off alone or the love interest is undeserving of the protagonist. In the ever-fluctuating-in-popularity love triangle, it means the protagonist chooses who will be right for them, whether that’s in the short term or long term, even if it is not the popular choice among readers (or if you’re like Tessa Gray from the Infernal Devices series, you get the best of both worlds). Or sometimes, it really does mean your protagonist chooses themselves as Mr. Right. If they can’t find someone who will communicate with them, who comes to understand them well enough to know what they need, who they don’t find attractive or stinkin’ cute, then what’s more important is learning what they ultimately want from their Mr. Right, and deciding to wait until they find them.

But thankfully, in romantic fiction, the protagonist will end up with their Mr. Right, and it gives the rest of us hope that one day, we’ll find our Mr. Right, too.

In Writing Mr. Right, I can confirm Ziya ends up finding her Mr. Right. The real question is… can she keep him? I guess you’ll have to read to find out!

Check out Alina Khawaja’s Writing Mr. Right here:

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“Writing has changed a great deal since you started.”

 “I wrote my first eight books on a 1958 manual, portable Olympia—solid steel. I started out in the newspaper business in the 70s, tapping away on a typewriter. We had copy paper and carbon paper. We had paste pots with a little brush stuck down the middle—cut and paste. It’s all different.”

“There’s something to be said for that tactile experience.”

“When I was doing magazine stories, I’d have pages all over the floor of my apartment living room, and I’d be on my hands and knees trying to figure out where everything went. To this day, when I’m working on a book, I have chapters laid out on the floor because I’m trying to find if I’ve duplicated something or if I should move something. I still print and edit. I print it out every day. I just finished yesterday hand-editing the draft that I’m doing. For some reason, I can’t really edit on the computer. I have to hold the manuscript in my hands and duplicate the reading experience. I see things when I’m reading the manuscript that I don’t see on the screen, including typos. I think it was on Facebook, a young writer was asking the other day, ‘What are you supposed to do, print out the whole book? And then you have this giant stack of pages?’ And I was like, ‘Well, you kind of do it chapter by chapter.’ I felt like I was from another era.”

“Or another planet. You started as a newspaperman?”

“Yeah, I was doing paid summer internships in Southern California for the Santa Monica Evening Outlook chain, covering city council meetings when I was 19. I’ve just always been a writer. I’ve been a writer in lots of different formats—magazines, television sitcoms, screenplays—and my ultimate goal was books. It took me a long time to work my way to getting my first novel published.”

“And it did well, your first novel.”

“Yeah, it did. Not as well as Hoagy did, but my first novel was actually a coming-of-age novel called Kiddo. It got a rave review in the Sunday Times Book Review. I got my own page with my picture and the whole thing, but I didn’t marry a movie star, and I didn’t become a millionaire. My first murder mystery, The Man Who Died Laughing, was based on an experience I had. One of the things I did along the way was ghostwrite a memoir of a real-life murder in the late 70s that took place in New York. It was a major tabloid murder. I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember this, but it was Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“He allegedly killed her in Room 100 of the Chelsea Hotel, knifed her in the bathroom. It was her mother’s story. I learned a lot from that experience. That’s how I got the idea of a young novelist who had achieved great success, married a movie star, and then got writer’s block, fell on his ass, snorted everything away—his marriage, his career—and as a last-ditch fallback, his agent talked him into ghostwriting a memoir of a famous comic from the 1950s. It was called The Man Who Died Laughing, and it was nominated for an Anthony Award.”

“That was your first mystery.”

“Yep. My editor, Kate Miciak, called me up, and I said, ‘What’s an Anthony Award?’ And she said, ‘It’s awarded every year at Bouchercon,’ and I said, ‘What’s Bouchercon?’ I didn’t know anything. I wasn’t part of the mystery community at all. It didn’t win, but my third one, The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald, did win an Edgar Award and an American Mystery Award. At that point in my career—this was the late 80s—I would sit down every day, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was doing. I really didn’t. After I won the Edgar, I realized that I actually did know what I was doing. I just didn’t realize it.”

Check out David Handler’s The Man Who Swore He’d Never Go Home Again here:

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“Let me ask you a couple of questions, then, about knowing what you’re doing. A lot of our readers are writers-to-be, and they want to avoid plot dumping—which you don’t do. You’ve got snappy dialogue moving the story forward. When you first sit down to write a scene, do you start with what needs to be said, or with who’s saying it?”

“It varies from book to book. I try not to crowd too much. I’ll try to keep the pacing going, and whatever will keep that going and move the story along.”

“You carry a lot of the story in the dialogue.”

“I do. I write pretty good descriptions. My prose is good, particularly in the Hoagy series, but my strength has always been dialogue. That’s why I got paid a lot of money to write TV—because I wrote good comic dialogue. But in a weird sort of way, I feel like a bit of an impostor as a mystery writer, because I don’t really consider myself a crime writer. I consider myself a writer of character fiction. I create interesting, smart characters—people I’d want to know more about, or people who have a lot of secrets. I create this ensemble. It’s a story about these people, and somebody ends up dying. I don’t start with the murder. I start with the characters.”

“You start with ensemble first.”

“That’s the most important thing for me—coming up with my ensemble of characters. What is going to happen? I don’t quite know how I’m going to get there, but I have a basic thumbnail idea. I know pretty much who’s going to die and why and who did it, but the fun part is creating all of the different characters and their interlocking relationships, interlocking pasts, their motives—and making them all plausible.”

“In your dialogue, there’s a lot of emotional subtext. How do you say what needs to be said between the lines without beating the reader over the head?”

“I do a lot of trimming. I just try to be as low-key about that sort of thing as possible. When I first started out, I used to try a lot harder to be funny. I was coming out of TV, where you were used to doing five jokes to a page. My dialogue now tends to be a little more reflective.”

Click to continue.

“And you accomplish multiple things at once.”

“You have to. One of the things you have to learn how to do is to accomplish more than one thing with your dialogue and your description. You’ve got to get heart in there, in addition to humor and information. If you’re not moving the story forward, then the scene has no purpose.”

“And you use yours to plant clues, give misdirection, suspicion.”

“Without hitting people over the head. I worked with some amazing people when I was doing movies. I wrote two projects with William Goldman, and one of the things he taught me is that if you’re not moving the story forward in each scene, then the scene has no purpose.”

“Even the funny scenes?”

“We used to get into arguments. Remember L.A. Confidential? One of the most famous scenes is the Lana Turner scene. Kevin Spacey and Guy Pearce are at Formosa Café, and Pearce thinks the woman is a hooker pretending to be Lana Turner. Turns out she’s really Lana Turner. She throws a drink in his face. Hilarious. Bill said that scene should have been cut because it didn’t move the story forward. And I said, ‘But everybody loves that scene!’ He didn’t care. He was a purist.”

“Something that struck me in The Man Who Swore He’d Never Go Home Again is how distinct your characters’ voices are.”

“I make notes about each character before I start writing the book.”

“You don’t even need dialogue attributes. The voices are that clear.”

“It’s really important to write good characters. That’s what I try to focus on—making them individual.”

“And you make them sympathetic—even the murderer.”

“Yeah, I don’t write monsters. I think we’re weak and greedy and want things we can’t have, or think we should have, or carry a grudge. I try to make the murder an outgrowth of a character’s flaws and weaknesses. Over the drafts, I work on making them as fleshed out as possible.”

“This is book sixteen in the Hoagy series. What was different this time?”

“I went all the way back to the beginning—before the before, in a way. When Hoagy walks into the Blue Mill Restaurant in Greenwich Village and sees Merilee. They lock eyes, and their lives change. Lulu the basset hound isn’t even in the picture yet. Merilee’s about to pick her up in a few days.”

“So even after all these books, you’re still discovering new ground.”

“I got to explore Hoagy’s childhood. We knew almost nothing about it before. His family had operated a brass mill in Connecticut for five generations. But we didn’t know why he and his father hadn’t spoken since high school. I also brought in his childhood friend and high school sweetheart, Maggie McKenna. She calls to tell him the town librarian—who really saw his gift early on—has died. That librarian was a big figure in his life.”

“Sometimes writers turn dialogue into soliloquies. How do you know when to divide it up?”

“I’ve written like 34 books. At this point, it’s instinct. I just know when something needs to be broken up—or when we don’t even need it.”

“Do you ever break the William Goldman rule and keep a line just because you love it?”

“Yeah. I’ve got running gags and Lulu things I can’t resist. But I’ve learned to pare them down. A little bit goes a long way. That took me a long time to learn.”

_____________________________

David Handler is the Edgar Award-winning author of several bestselling mystery series. He began his career as a New York City reporter. In 1988, he published The Man Who Died Laughing, the first of his long-running series starring ghostwriter Stuart Hoag and his faithful basset hound Lulu. http://davidhandlerbooks.com/

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(Secrets We Keep From Each Other.)

Distinct from moral control, one of the most beautiful aspects of books is their ability to achieve a kind of mind-control by transcending the boundaries of consciousness, by taking over through subsumption. A book can only achieve this if the writer has written with complete and unconscious faith in the reality of his characters: Only then can a character stand for himself, only then can he stay vivid and strong (even if the character himself is weak-hearted and spineless) as readers address him with their queries, or project onto him their visions and theories. 

When writing fiction, the desire to too directly guide a reader has never occurred to me. Ava, the narrator of my debut novel What You Make of Me, invites projection; she invites a bit of theorizing, despite her defiance and desire for control. A reader might wonder at her aims, at her self-awareness, at the things she says and her reasons for saying them, at her art (she is a painter). But while writing, I felt I knew Ava and understood her. She was multidimensional to me. My goal (‘goal’ is not quite the right word… but my ‘charge’ sounds absurd) was to create a character who is equal parts definitive, present, evasive, inward, self-contradictory. 

Confronting this challenge became my favorite part of writing the novel. I was constantly aware of Ava’s shifting levels of self-awareness. I wanted a few aspects of her psyche to bubble up, cross the threshold of consciousness, and make their way into clear, explicit writing. I needed other aspects of her psyche to hover just below that threshold of consciousness, to be underthoughts that haunt but do not penetrate the narrative.

At times Ava has an idea of what is hovering just below. At times she does not. Then—when she thinks she does know—at times she is right, at times she is mistaken; further, at times she knows she is mistaken about herself, and at times she does not know she is mistaken (but the reader, perhaps, knows she is mistaken). This is all to say: Ava is a human being, with oblique paths of access into herself, some more right and revelatory than others, some errant (but still, somehow, psychologically productive). 

AND WHY SHOULDN’T THAT BE TRUE?? AFTER ALL…in a novel, it is a characters’ ultimate unknowability—their ability to evade our capture—that endows them with real human spirit, for the simple reason that in the real world, real human beings possess an inwardness that is and should be inaccessible to us. We don’t know if Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is frigid and remote despite or because of her romanticism (or neither). In Lolita we can’t quite gauge Humbert Humbert’s interpretation of his primordial wound (that first love), or its impact on his psyche. We don’t know for sure if Dostoyevsky’s monkish Alyosha is noble and circumspect, or if he is rather weak, naive—or if he is each of these things (he is!). 

Click to continue.

As Zadie smith writes in “Fascinated to presume: In Defense of Fiction”: “Fiction suspects that there is far more to people than what they choose to make manifest … Fiction is suspicious of any theory of the self that appears to be largely founded on what can be seen with the human eye (…) Fiction—at least the kind that is any good—is full of doubt, self-doubt above all. It has grave doubts about the nature of the self.” 

It is this doubt—the doubt we feel even when looking into the eyes of a loved one and feeling not just closeness but in fact, and paradoxically, an insuperable distance—that feels most human, that drives and feeds our will to know and understand. In novels, we might come to love characters or despise them; we might argue in defense of them, or protest their actions; we might put our book down and feel a narrator’s presence as a shadow self throughout the day, or we might put a book down as if it is the blade that will slice through us next we return. 

A text, I believe, is at its deepest when the reader does about as much ushering in of her own as possible. It’s not that writers trust their readers to do this (or trust their readers to hold the ‘right’ impression of their characters), it’s that readers always and must do this—they must use their minds to co-engineer a character. It is an ineluctable part of the reading process (see Barthes, etc). The most a writer can (must) do is put human spirit onto the page in all its lucidity and difficulty. Thus my decision not to ‘explain’ on Ava’s behalf is not an intentional act of evasion, it’s an unconscious process of trying to generate reality. 

Of course, because I respect her life and humor, and because I have faith in Ava, it would make me itch to see readers come to her with what I take to be misunderstanding. But that’s the way it goes. There’s nothing she or I can do. The reader must take over, accrue his own impressions of Ava, and project his own reasons, and supply his own logic. 

This fact, I believe, wouldn’t bother her. I hope readers will see her as the kind of person who is both radically open—she would change her clothes with the door open in a dressing room or easily talk constipation—while at the same time rigorous in protecting a deeper privacy, a more profound and complete solitude, her inwardness, which no misunderstanding could touch.

Check out Sophie Madeline Dess’ What You Make of Me here:

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(3 Reasons Frenemies Are So Fun to Write.)

If you say, for example, “I met this fascinating woman from Morocco with big crazy green eyes who told me she kept a flock of peacocks in her front yard,” your friend is more likely to say, “Oh—I think I might have seen her” than if you’d said, “I met a woman from another country who likes birds.” Too vague, right? Your friend wouldn’t have much to go on.

I treat my characters the same way. The Bayrose Files, my latest book, is a novella, so creating memorable characters quickly is even more urgent than usual.  In one of the early chapters, for example, the protagonist, a young woman named Violet, attends a group lecture, where she meets a number of people who will be important in her life for months to come. She needs to fix their names and identities in her mind. Here’s where she meets one of the men in the group.

I took a seat at the second table and soon a giant of a man with a well-groomed black beard joined me. He wore an old army jacket with several military badges on it and a white shirt with a striped tie. It must have been some kind of statement, but I’m not sure of what. He was another fiction writer, I soon found out, named Phrank. “With a PH.” Ah.

Obviously, Violet is very observant, and she’s already developing a judgment about Phrank. She describes another group member here.

She was very thin and rather delicate looking, probably a bit older than me. Her hair, ear-length and very curly, was colorless—I mean to say it might have been light brown or it might have been grey or it might have been transparent. In the extreme sunlight, you just couldn’t tell. She was smiling, and I smiled back. She proffered a thin white hand. “Cordelia Hight,” she said. Her hand fluttered into and out of mine briefly, like a confused moth.

And here’s how she describes her first meeting with a very important character who will later change her life.

He appeared to be about forty, and was a tad portly, but in that comfortable way some men have that doesn’t bother me. He wore prescription-looking sunglasses, a red baseball cap, a dazzlingly white T-shirt, and khaki Bermudas. The shirt was a dead giveaway that he was married; left to their own devices, men never bleach anything.

Click to continue.

This kind of observation allows you to suggest things about the observer as well. Like her judgment about Phrank, Violet’s comment about the bleached shirt gives us insight into her own character. This kind of description will live in a reader’s mind, so you don’t have to keep reminding them who your character is; you can just add to what they already know. In another novel of mine, My Famous Brain, the narrator describes meeting his paramour’s landlady.

I turned and peered into the dimness. There in one corner, in one of the chubby chairs, sat a plump elderly woman with a huge, orange, longhaired cat on her lap. She wore, of course, a crocheted shawl and slippers, and had little wire spectacles on her nose. A pair of canes rested against her footstool. She did not wear a lace cap, but she may as well have. “Madam,” I said, “Forgive me. I did not see you there.”

Fun, right? Creating memorable characters like this is one of my favorite parts of writing. If you listen to the way people around you talk, I think you’ll notice that this technique is very popular. “Uncle Jimmy got a haircut, but insisted the barber leave his ‘60s sideburns alone,” you might hear your mother say.

Or a friend tells you, “I just met my new boss, but I think I might have a problem understanding him because he tends to speak in a whisper.” Or your boyfriend might comment (to your consternation) after meeting a colleague of yours, “Wow, that Anita looks exactly like Audrey Hepburn, don’t you think?”

You get the picture right away, in each case. Individuals, not cardboard cut-outs. And that’s what all of us want in our stories!

Check out Diane Wald’s The Bayrose Files here:

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(Immutable Moments: The Load-Bearing Beats of a Story.)

Readers fall in love with characters, not plot charts. And while a well-structured plot might be the bones of your story, it’s the emotional arc that encourages readers to tattoo your protagonist’s words on their forearm or draw fan art of the entire ensemble of your novel. Readers remember characters who feel alive, and that life comes from the emotional arc.

I love a good plot twist as much as anyone. Give me a moment of “That was the murderer???” or “Oh no, the evil goats were the true villains all along,” and I will happily drop my tea in shock.

But readers don’t stay for the twist. They stay for the people it happens to.

You can build a plot so intricate it deserves its own wall of Post-It notes, but if the reader doesn’t care about your protagonist, it won’t land. If your character doesn’t struggle, fail, or crack open some part of themselves by the end, readers simply won’t care.

But how do you make your characters feel flawed, real, and unforgettable? And how do you craft an emotional arc that matters?

Writing an Emotional Arc That Matters

A well-crafted emotional arc gives shape to your character’s transformation. It asks:

• Who were they at the start?
• What did they believe about the world?
• What challenged that belief?
• What did they choose to do in response?

The emotional arc generally has three phases:

The Things They Believe

Your character starts the story believing something untrue about themselves or the world. They don’t need other humans, they’re unworthy of love, they aren’t strong enough to save the world. This belief drives their early choices, for better or worse.

The Struggle

In Act Two, the plot tries to kill your character—emotionally or literally and your character struggles, fights, and fails. Internal conflict brews. The events of the plot poke at long-held beliefs. Shift happens.

The Shift

At some point, your character does something that reflects a change in belief. They change not because the plot needed it, but because they did. They’ve been transformed by the story.

In other words, plot is what happens. Emotion is why it matters.

An Example of an Emotional Arc

A high-powered lawyer with an espresso addiction and the emotional availability of a granite countertop believes she needs no one. That’s the initial lie.

The events of the plot? Her grandma has died and left her a homemade marmalade and candle shop called, “Orange You Glad It’s Jam.”

She returns home, intending to sell the shop and get out fast because she believes she needs no one—until she meets the woodchopper widow next door. Strong forearms. Kind eyes. A tragic backstory. Probably also has a dog.

Enter act 2 where the plot does everything it can to attack the original belief. The lawyer tries to juggle legal briefs by day and candle-making by night. She does not need help! She meets with potential buyers. Then things break down and the widow next door comes over to help fix them. The community begins to endear themselves to your character. The widow next door wears very soft flannel shirts.

Eventually, the protagonist reaches the shift—maybe when she lets herself grieve for her grandmother, or when she misses a big city client call because she’s hosting the town’s jam festival. Whatever the climatic moment, it’s clear the protagonist is a new person. And she and the widow next door adopt a second dog.

Why the Emotional Arc Matters

Internal conflict is the tension between who your character is and who they could become. It’s not about what’s happening to them—it’s about what’s happening inside them.

Maybe your protagonist is torn between loyalty and truth. Maybe he thinks vulnerability equals weakness. Maybe they’re trying to be the hero but secretly believe they’re the villain. Whatever it is, internal conflict keeps readers turning pages because they see the stakes even when nothing explodes. It’s that ache of watching someone continue to make mistakes which readers recognize because real humans have also made so many.

It’s imperative. You can have aliens and explosions in your climax, but if your character hasn’t wrestled with what they believe, the moment falls flat. The high-powered lawyer finally kisses the hot, flannel-wearing widow, but if there hasn’t been an emotional journey to it, who cares? A good emotional arc makes quiet stories resonate, but it’s also there to give a human element to your epic action-adventure stories.

Click to continue.

Pairing the Emotional Arc With Plot Beats

Every major plot beat should do double duty—not just moving the story forward but deepening or challenging the emotional arc.

The Inciting Incident: Something changes in the character’s world. It’s also the first time your main character starts to question the worldview that’s gotten them to where they are now.

First Plot Point: They commit to a new path, but they’re not always ready. Things begin to change. They’re learning how to navigate this new world, making new allies and enemies, and all of this causes emotional reactions.

Midpoint: The external plot twist should intersect with a shift in emotional understanding. Maybe they see a reflection of who they used to be. Maybe they feel something they haven’t allowed themselves to feel in years. Maybe they start to believe they’ll be able to do this thing, whatever this thing is.

Dark Night of the Soul: A loss. A failure. Everything falls apart and it’s probably your character’s fault. This is where they realize everything they thought they wanted has ruined everything they really want.

Climax: Whether they are beating the villain, closing the case, or saving the town’s jam festival, the emotional choice matters most. Your character is able to save the day because they’re changed.

Ultimately, emotional arcs give plot beats a human factor. They make the stakes feel personal. And when you sync them up, readers will not only go along on your character’s journey, but they’ll also feel it.

And it isn’t always a full, perfect arc. Real emotional growth is jagged. It happens in fits and starts. It backslides.

Write From the Heart First, Brain Later

It’s okay to let your character resist the truth for longer than feels comfortable. It’s realistic for them to have moments where they start to change, then backslide. Or maybe they make the wrong decisions, even after they’ve supposedly learned better.

If you let your characters reach their moment of self-growth through awkward attempts at doing better, the moment they finally reach their ah-ha moment will feel earned.

At the end of the day, plot gives your story structure. But emotional arcs give it soul.

Readers will remember how your book made them feel. The ache of longing. The sigh of relief. The moment of transformation that gave them hope.

So yes, build your plot. Tighten your beats. But don’t forget to ask:

• What does this mean to my character?
• How are they changing—and why now?
• What truth are they terrified to admit?

Write from the heart first. The brain can catch up in revisions. Because the stories that stay with us aren’t the most logical.

They’re the most felt.

The post Heart First, Brain Later: Why Your Character’s Emotional Arc Matters More Than Your Perfect Plot appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(25 Plot Twist Ideas and Prompts for Writers.)

This is something I tried to do in my debut novel, An Ethical Guide to Murder, where a failed lawyer, Thea, discovers she has power over life and death. She can tell exactly how long someone has to live and transfer that life from one person to another—killing the first person in the process. She wants to do the right thing and creates an “Ethical Guide to Murder” to punish the wrongdoers and give the deserving more time. But of course, deciding who gets to live and die is tricky, to say the least, and she quickly finds herself in an ethical minefield.

When I describe it, people get excited about Thea’s power and instantly start asking questions I explore in the novel. So, without any further waffle, here are my tips for giving your character powers that people care about.

Find your why

Superpowers tend to be more interesting when there’s a point to them. For example, telepathy is endlessly fascinating because we’d all love to know what people really think. Getting clear on what you care about will help you define your world, the story, and the power itself.

I was interested in the concept of fairness. Specifically, how is it fair that some good people die young while some bad people live long healthy lives? So, I gave Thea the power to change this.

So, what do you care about? I recommend doing some rambling free-writing to figure this out because you probably care about more than one thing. Continually ask yourself “and why do I care about this?” until you zero in on what feels like the most important reason—use this as the anchor for your story.

Connect character with powers

Your character and their power are intertwined. You’ve probably heard of concepts like “fatal flaws” and “defining misbeliefs”—powers are a great way to amplify these and see what they are really made of.

In Ethical Guide, Thea starts with a very black-and-white view of morality. Suddenly gaining power over life and death upends this worldview, and she spends the rest of the novel trying to figure out what “the right thing to do” really is. This gave me much more scope for character development than say, giving the power to an evil serial killer. No ethical dilemmas there, just murder.

She’s also a hot mess who struggles to be responsible for her own laundry—not someone you would trust with such power. Sometimes, giving powers to a surprising or unusual character and seeing what they do with it is more interesting than the power itself. It’s definitely more fun to write.

Click to continue.

More power more problems

Powers will help your character solve problems, but they should create just as many. Some of these will be external problems. Is there a cost to using the power? What happens if your character’s power is discovered? How will they learn to control it? Do other people have powers too?

But my favorite problems are the internal ones. A character with trust issues might struggle to find mentors. One with anger issues might use their power rashly and get caught.

The more powerful your character is, the bigger the problems you need to give them. This stops them simply solving the conflict of your novel too easily. In Ethical Guide, Thea is extremely powerful, but she’s also facing the impossible problem of deciding how to “ethically” murder people (alongside others, many of her own making).

Create a fresh spin

It’s hard to create a truly unique power. You also don’t have to. I hadn’t seen Thea’s exact power before, but I’ve read about characters with the power to kill by touch and ones who could tell how long someone had to live. Sometimes you might combine existing ideas to create something new, or slightly change how a power works.

Your fresh spin could even be the situation or the setting. In Naomi Alderman’s The Power, the most unique aspect is not the power itself, but the fact that young women everywhere develop it overnight. In Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Lauren has hyperempathy. But what’s so unusual is that she has this power in a dystopian world full of pain and suffering. It can physically incapacitate her at times, making it an extremely dangerous ability to have.

Remember that it’s your character and ideas that make your story unique. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel unless you want to.

Let the reader discover the power

My final tip is a quick one. It’s tempting to over-explain how a power works, especially if you’ve put a lot of thought into it. Don’t! Give us enough to understand what’s going on, and then leave little seeds to intrigue us. Coming up with theories about how a power works is fun, especially if we’re proven right later on. Or, even more fun, when there’s a clever twist we didn’t see coming.

Check out Jenny Morris’ An Ethical Guide to Murder here:

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(Prose Fiction vs. Graphic Novels.)

In adapting a long running comics character for the prose medium, I learned some valuable tricks of the trade. It’s certainly been an interesting convergence of the two formerly separate paths my writer’s life has taken.

Growing up in a small town in Ohio, I was a huge fan of comic books, but as far as I knew they were produced in New York City, that might as well have been on Mars as far as I was concerned.

But prose was everywhere around me, and I was reasonably adept at it as a kid, writing short stories and starting (and not finishing—sound familiar?) a dozen novels before leaving for college. I went to Syracuse University to study filmmaking, since in my youthful arrogance I figured I didn’t need anyone to teach me how to write prose, and, again—comics seemed like an inaccessible industry to me.

To my shock, I discovered I couldn’t stand the tedium that went along with making movies—dressing sets, waiting for the sun to rise or set, lugging around heavy cameras and lights—and instead I fell in with the guys who were studying to become illustrators in SU’s comics club. I wrote short comics scripts for them and reveled in the magic of those images coming to life under their pens. After graduation, a few of us decided to move to Mars—er, New York City, and break into the industry.

Break in I eventually did, in a manner that would be better served with its own article, and I’ve written six New York Times bestsellers on the comics lists and counting, including one, Cowboys & Aliens, that would be made into a movie.

As my comics fame grew, publishers began approaching me to write prose, a skill I hadn’t exercised in any great amount since I was in school. As I began work on what would become my first published novel, Ten Dead Comedians, I fell in love with the written word all over again. Two more novels, The Con Artist and Never Sleep, followed.

Then, something interesting happened: The fantastic publisher of Never Sleep, Blackstone, acquired the novel rights to the stable of Valiant Comics, the third biggest universe of superhero characters behind venerable Marvel and DC. They wanted to know if I’d take on one of their titles. I leapt at the chance.

Bloodshot is one of Valiant’s most popular and exciting characters—you may recall the movie with Vin Diesel from a few years ago. A super soldier injected with microscopic nanomachines that heal him from any injury and let him communicate with any machine, like most superheroes, Bloodshot has gone through a number of incarnations since he was created by Kevin VanHook, Don Perlin, and Bob Layton in 1992.

Even though this was a prose novel, the first thing I did on taking the assignment was what I always do when taking on a new comics character: I read pretty much every story about him I could, trying to wring from that gestalt the essence of the character, what made him unique and interesting to me, and (hopefully) the reader.

I knew going in that Valiant and Blackstone wanted a completely fresh take on the character, something separate from any pre-existing comic (or movie!) that would attract legacy fans and brand-new readers alike. So I had the freedom to create my own Platonic ideal of Bloodshot, that perfect distillation of the concept.

The most interesting aspect of Bloodshot, to me, was the idea that as a side effect of the nanomachines coursing through his veins, his handlers in the shadowy pseudo-government agency that created him, Project: Rising Spirit, could erase his memory with each mission. Just as his body heals instantaneously from wounds, his conscience heals instantly from any regrettable actions he might have been ordered to do on any mission, because his bosses just use a giant chalkboard eraser on his brain and get rid of any memories that might cause trauma. That meant a soldier with no PTSD, but also, less attractively, a soldier with no real sense of who he was.

As a writer I have long been fascinated by memory, and its primary role in making up our sense of self—who we are, after all, is the sum of where we’ve been and where we want to go. Here I knew I had my hook. What would happen to Bloodshot if his short-term memory was wiped but his handlers weren’t around to help him fill in the long-term blanks afterward? What if he wakes up with no memory of who he is, or what he’s supposed to do?

That led to another conclusion—I should write this book not just in the first-person, from Bloodshot’s point of view, but in the first-person present tense. That put the reader in the mind of someone who had no past, tense or otherwise, but only had the present—he lives in the eternal now.

The other aspects of the plot fell in quite quickly after that, with the idea that Bloodshot is found amnesiac in the woods by a young woman, Kalea, and her younger brother. At first they think they’re helping him, but pretty soon they are on the lam from Project: Rising Spirit themselves, who not only want to get their assassin asset Bloodshot back—they also want to get their hands on Kalea too, who has mysterious powers of her own, and are linked to an underground network of superpowered young people that sees Bloodshot as the ultimate bogeyman. Bloodshot then becomes their protector.

Along the way, Bloodshot will have to solve the mystery of his own identity—and he may not like every answer. As the tagline for our book says (which, full confession, I ripped off the 2012 comics revival of the character): He can trust no one, not even himself.

What makes prose different from any other storytelling medium is its ability to bring us into the mind of a character, to show all events strained through their consciousness. I found that the biggest challenge for me returning to prose after years of pretty much exclusively writing comics scripts was to continually remind myself that I had to be that consciousness. I had to fill in every visual detail myself; I couldn’t leave something unsaid for an artist to fill in later. The shade of orange in the autumn leaves; the expression of that woman crossing the street wearing sunglasses—all of those things were my responsibility to flesh out. Nobody else was going to do it for me.

In comics, the writer conducts the orchestra. In prose, the writer is a one-person band.

Of course, all good prose writing is visually evocative writing. This is doubly true when adapting comics to prose. In my years in comics scripting, I tried to be as sparse as possible in my descriptions, both to make it clear to the artist what I wanted, and also to give them as much leeway as possible in bringing those images to life. That led naturally to a staccato, rat-a-tat prose that lends itself to the heart pounding action scenes and chase sequences that I know Bloodshot fans will be expecting when they pick the novel up. (The first-person present tense gives an incredible sense of urgency to every scene!)

That’s been the best part of this experience: learning how to use the best aspects of each medium to create the best adaptation of a comics character that I can. It’s certainly done nothing but increase my love for crafting both comics and prose, and I hope thriller readers and comics fans alike dig right into Bloodshot when it drops in January. 

Check out Fred Van Lente’s Bloodshot here:

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