Author For the People 

After years of struggle with plot, I’ve concluded that it’s all about people. I know, I know. That sounds simple-minded. But it’s not so simple. Stories that interest human readers spring from two elements: events and personalities. We humans spend our years coping with events and their consequences. Our lives are a series of challenges. Some are small. Some are big. How we cope and why different people cope in such different ways—or have a meltdown and don’t cope at all—that’s where it gets complicated. And that’s where good stories come from. Stories that are interesting because in some way, they apply to our own life journeys.

 All kinds of events can get a story rolling. Weather events: hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, etc. But these would not be of interest to storytellers if they didn’t affect humans. Other events include accidents, sudden unexpected deaths, dreadful maiming, financial ruin, betrayal, war, sexual violence. The Oliver Redcastle historical mystery I’m working on now starts with a simple relocation. Oliver and his small family leave Baltimore and move to New Mexico. Not as dramatic as some initiating events, but cataclysmic in its consequences. 

The reason for that, of course, is the people involved—how they interact with each other and the new environment. For the writer, in this case me, this takes getting to know what New Mexico in 1886 was like. Fortunately, it was an interesting place. The American west was much more than cowboys and wagon trains. To make good use of my discoveries I must know my characters well enough to be able to imagine how they will behave under the circumstances I have either invented or learned about in the course of my research. Usually it’s a combination of both. I discover interesting things that happened in the western United States in the 1880’s and my imagination starts churning.  

But all this time my characters are churning, too. Sometimes they don’t behave at all in the way I expected.  Oliver’s reaction to ranching is not what I first imagined. His mercurial lady love, Marietta, behaves a little differently than I thought she might. Chloe, Oliver’s daughter, is no longer the small child she was in the earlier books. Time brings changes. But that’s exciting. It means the story is taking on a life of its own along with the characters. It also means I must do some serious thinking about the people whose story I’m trying to tell. The better I know my characters, the richer their stories. That’s what I’m counting on.