#Guest Post - Author Linda Gillard on Creating Characters in fiction.

Hello RFWers!

This week our guest author post is from Linda Gillard, a new favourite author of mine. Linda creates the most amazing, out-of-the-box non-stereotypical characters. She is going to share her method of creating characters with us.

LINDA GILLARD ON CREATING CHARACTERS

Hello everyone.
As a reader, I tend to have clear ideas about what fictional characters should look like, but I’m not always certain what my own characters look like. When I was writing my first novel, EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY, I kept visualising myself as my heroine Rose, simply because she was the same age as me and like me, she made quilts.

Rose looked quite different from me in the book, but somehow I still couldn’t see her, so I decided to look through magazines until I found a photo of someone who looked something like my idea of Rose. Eventually I found one and the character finally took off.

Photos bailed me out again when I was writing my third novel, STAR GAZING. I got stuck early on with my strong-but-silent Scots hero, Keir. I knew how he spoke, how he behaved and I knew he was a gentle giant, but I just couldn’t visualise him in any detail. (This was probably something to do with the fact that my heroine never sees Keir because she’s blind.) The book was limping along with a gap where Keir should have been in all his physical glory. Then one day I saw a photo in a magazine of Gerard Butler displaying the exact blend of virility and vulnerability that I’d envisaged for Keir. Once I’d “cast” Butler, the character took off and the book practically wrote itself.

Gerald Butler

Now when I’m starting a novel, I routinely “audition” for my major characters. I used to cut pictures out of magazines and make scrapbooks, but nowadays I tend to search online and put photos on my desktop. They could be of anyone, not necessarily celebrities. I don’t even have to know who they are or what they do. It’s just the look of the person that’s important.

I’ts a bit of a mystery where my characters actually come from. Characters just seem to jump into my head. They seem like real people, friends I haven’t met yet. Writing the novel is a sort of discovery process for me. I’m only interested in writing about people I like or find fascinating, so I think I just make up people I want to spend time with. (And it’s a lot of time. I might spend two years working on a book, so my characters need to be complex to absorb me for that length of time.) But I can’t claim to understand my creative process. My son once referred to my writing as playing with my imaginary friends. I think that’s a pretty good description of what I do!

I write about spiky, awkward, real women and most of them aren’t young, pretty or thin, which only compounds their felonies. The heroine of STAR GAZING is middle-aged, widowed and blind and she’s not too happy about any of that. (In fact the Scots hero describes her as "crabbit".) Over the years my heroines’ bolshy behaviour has led to some editorial conflict as I’ve resisted attempts made by patient and longsuffering editors to make my female protagonists nicer

It’s not just that I think, in fiction, nice is generally boring. It’s that I’m steeped in the classics and know niceness is not necessary; that many a book has stood the test of time despite the heroine’s lack of social skills.

Don't miss LInda's latest book, The Glass Guardian,

Ruth Travers has lost a lover, both parents and her job. Now she thinks she might be losing her mind...

When death strikes again, Ruth finds herself the owner of a dilapidated Victorian house on the Isle of Skye: Tigh na Linne, the summer home she shared as a child with her beloved Aunt Janet, the woman she’d regarded as a mother.

As Ruth prepares to put the old house up for sale, she’s astonished to find she’s not the only occupant. Worse, she suspects she might be falling in love...

With a man who died almost a hundred years ago.

Other books by Linda and how to buy -
A LIFETIME BURNING http://www.amazon.com/A-LIFETIME-BURNING-ebook/dp/B006VOL2WE/ref=pd_sim_kstore_5

STAR GAZING (This is the pb link) http://www.amazon.com/Star-Gazing-Linda-Gillard/dp/B007MXVG38/ref=tmm_pap_title_0

EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY:http://www.amazon.com/EMOTIONAL-GEOLOGY-ebook/dp/B0055T357G/ref=pd_sim_kstore_5

HOUSE OF SILENCE http://www.amazon.com/HOUSE-OF-SILENCE-ebook/dp/B004USSPN2/ref=pd_sim_kstore_3

www.lindagillard.co.uk

Linda Gillard lives in the Scottish Highlands and has been an actress, journalist and teacher. She’s the author of six novels, including STAR GAZING, short-listed in 2009 for Romantic Novel of the Year and the Robin Jenkins Literary Award (for writing that promotes the Scottish landscape.) STAR GAZING was also votedFavourite Romantic Novel 1960 - 2010 by Woman's Weekly readers.

Linda's fourth novel, HOUSE OF SILENCE became a Kindle bestseller, selling over 20,000 copies in its first year. It was selected by Amazon as one of their Top Ten "Best of 2011" in the Indie Author category.