A Ruth by any other name, by Catriona

How do you come up with character personality sketches for your books - do you plunge in and let your characters develop on the page, use real life people as inspiration, turn to personality frameworks like the enneagram? Especially for those who've written a lot of previous books - how do you keep your new characters from looking and feeling like your old ones?

I too have no clue what "enneagram" is, so that's that out of the way.

Next, I want to say how much I love Mary Higgins Clark, whose every book had a young, slim, pretty, red-haired, Irish-American heroine. It mattered not one jot to me, but I bet you wouldn't get it past an editor if you were anyone else.

I've never tried. But how do I do it? I remember making up Dandy Gilver, in 2002: I worked out where she lived, what her name was, what she looked like, her family structure and then started writing her first adventure. I can't remember what happened after that except for the still strong memory of being terrified, when I started writing book 2, that it wouldn't be the same person. That was the question I asked,voice shaking, when I handed over the draft to an early reader. The feedback was, "Of course it's the same person. Get a grip, you maniac." (The early reader was my husband.)

When it comes to the other, one-and-done characters in the Dandy Gilver novels, I try to find photographs of people who look like them and then I stare at the pictures until their names come to me. Imagine my surprise when, leafing through a coffee-table book about the golden age of travel to find an industrialist I needed, I came upon Dandy herself! To the life! (That's her on the right, with her rouge in the wrong place, looking uncomfortable.)

Modern characters come about differently, for some reason. I don't seem to need to find pictures of them; maybe because the people around me every day look enough like them? Who knows. For them, it starts with the name. Until the name is right, I can't do anything with the characters, and consequently with the story. In Deep Beneath Us, it took me ages to name the family at the the heart of the story. They finally became the Muirs, which is just right. It took even longer to come up with the given names for four cousins (Jo, Johnny, Davey and Tabitha) and their parents (Zelda, Roddy, Watson and Rowan), but the two other voice characters snapped into focus as soon as I knew they existed. Barrett Langholm, a jobbing gardener in his fifties, and Lyle "Gordo" Gordon, a thirty-ish fast-food cook, walked into the story and introduced themselves. 

But even with the names in place, in standalones I don't know any of these people. So, yes, I plunge in. I write that first draft not worrying about whether the characters are hanging together. I know I'll know them by the end. When I go back to the start to read the first draft, it's odd to find - for example - Gordo saying something in Chapter 3 that Gordo would never say. What idiot wrote this?

The genesis of Lexy Campbell in the Last Ditch comedies was different. For a start, I wanted her name to be the most ridiculous example of Gaelic spelling I could come up with. I think I nailed it with L-E-A-G-S-A-I-D-H: Lexy. It's Katrina-with-an-O dialled up to 11. After that, she's . . . me. She doesn't look like me or have my life but she has the misunderstandings and mishaps I had when I, like she did too, moved to California. And she says some things about life here that I don't entirely disavow. 

As to how I keep from writing the same character over and over again, now that I'm working on novel number ... OMG, I just clicked over to my website to check ... novel number 39?! I don't think it's up to me to say whether I do manage it. Maybe Mary Higgins Clark thought every one of her heroines was nothing like any of the others. But to the extent that they are different (whether that extent is yawning or titchy) I think jobs are a help. A therapist is different from a librarian. Someone who enjoys working in a supermarket is going to be different from someone who resents it. Someone who's stifled in a family business is not the same as someone who feels safe and happy with her dad telling her what to do. It's not everything, but you've got to start somewhere. 

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