Flaw. Want. Need. (my not-so-secret recipe to writing)

Poppy teaching a crime fiction workshop at Logan North Library last week.

Craft - 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? 

Initially, I thought this was a hard question to answer, my instinct was to say that my characters just pop into my head fully formed. Of course, that's not true. I teach crime fiction writing workshops, and in the class I share tools that I use to lean into the characters, to explore them to make sure they appear authentic and fully formed on the page. 

I use a tried and tested technique. For each character, (even the smaller ones) I write notes addressing these three things: Flaw, Want, Need. Once I know these things, it helps me shape the plot, for it shows me the character’s motivation. In one of my works in progress, I have a disgraced hotel night manager who arrives to stay at her estranged stepbrother’s beautiful home. She’s a Curious Connie, she likes to snoop and pry. This is her flaw. Her want is to find a home, and a job, as she has lost both because of her troubling behaviour at the five-star hotel where she worked. Her need is more complex. She needs to learn to trust herself, to accept people as they are without craving to learn all their intimate secrets, and to not be so needy – she needs to mind her own business and stop snooping in order to be happy.

Once I worked out these aspects of my character, the narrative starts firing on all pistons. The momentum picks up and so does my motivation to write. I can feel where the story is going. It’s a fantastic feeling, like being on a fast train heading to a great location. The urgency is what makes writing fun.

For me, the seed of an idea for a character often comes from real life. The seed for the hotel night manager came from my brother, who used to be a night manager. He told me lots of funny stories about rude or weird guests, about the complaints he had to manage, about the strange behaviour of certain staff members, and about the furtive comings and goings from the hotel late at night. It was fascinating, and I turned many of his stories into plot points in my novel. 

I like researching seemingly ordinary but interesting jobs for my characters. Fish farm manager, viticulturalist, colonial art dealer, chicken farmer – I’ve found a person who does each of these jobs and I interviewed them, and used parts of their stories to make my characters. There are so many interesting jobs in the world, I'll never run out of new ideas.