Character building, part two

When Susan Daly won a contest on this blog and earned a spot as a character in my next book, I needed to decide who she’d be. Not, I decided, a psychotic airline passenger barricaded aboard a jetliner. Who, then?

The title of the novel is The Dirty Secrets Club. How about a woman with secrets?

I knew several characters in the story would have powerful secrets. I imagined two of them meeting with heroine Jo Beckett. One was a high-powered businesswoman, sleek and ostentatious; the second was a flighty, nervous TV news reporter with a sleazy past. I wrote several scenes with these people, totalling many, many thousands of words. I kept on writing, hoping that these characters would get proactive, the way other writers claim their characters do, and that they’d “just take over.” Come on, girls, I thought. Run away with the story. I kept nudging and prodding them. At one point I even lifted my hands off the keyboard and told them it to take the wheel. No dice. These ingrates wanted me to do the work.

So I did. Then I let my editors read it all.

They kindly pointed out that I had too many characters. The story didn’t need both Ms. Sleek-Ostentatious and Ms. Flighty-Sleazy. One had to be rubbed out.

Back on the page, my characters heard that and got real interested in self-preservation, real fast. The rich one even tried to bribe me. But to no avail.

Ms. Sleek-Ostentatious had a snooty voice and a deliciously bitchy sensibility, but she didn’t do anything else in the story. She was erased.

That left Ms. Flighty-Sleazy… who needed a good, juicy secret. A good, juicy, plausible secret. And I hadn’t slathered her with the right sleaze factor. (In a thriller, your characters need SPF 40.) It was back to the drawing board. Out went the college sideline as a drug mule. In came…

In came Susan Daly, an ambitious young woman with a past that’s pyrotechnic. The rest is for readers to discover.