Finding the Character

Every now and then, someone asks me where I find my characters. The truth is, I steal them. Almost every one of my leading characters is based on someone I know.

Interesting enough, when I seek their permission and ask, “Would you rather be a killer or a victim,” no one wants to be the victim. Thus, ninety percent of my friends have committed literary murder.

Now that’s not to say they would actually commit murder. They’re upright, law-abiding people—so far as I know, but who hasn’t planned revenge of some sort?

My daughter/manager and I were talking the other day about Lena Taylor, her paternal grandma, and she suggested I put her in a book.

Lena certainly led an interesting life. Beautiful, slim, with black Irish coloring–black hair, pale skin, and blue eyes, Lena ran away and joined the circus when she was sixteen. She worked on the pie wagon, married George, a roustabout, had a son, and then moved on.

During the course of her life, she married three times—maybe four—or five–we don’t know for sure. My husband and his younger sister were the result of her marriage to my father-in-law, Lonnie Mabry, a rock-solid man with a huge heart and a bubbling sense of humor.

When her son was nine-years-old, she took her daughter and disappeared. Her son never saw her again.

The sister went back and forth from her mother to her father, depending on her mother’s boyfriends’ moods.

I only met Lena one time. She was in town and wanted to see her grandchild, so I invited her over. When my husband was told his mother was coming to visit, he arranged to be elsewhere.

She brought a quilt she’d made–every stitch by hand. My daughter still has it, and there’s a ghost story that goes with it. I wrote it in my book, The Russell House.

One of those who burned their candle at both ends, she died young, still in her fifties.

Her second son did not attend the funeral.

Think there’s a book in here?

What about you? Is there someone in your life whose story is clamoring to be told?