My novel Curva Peligrosa opens with a tornado that sweeps through the fictional town of Weed, Alberta, and drops a purple outhouse into its center. Drowsing and dreaming inside that structure is its owner, Curva Peligrosa—a curiosity and a marvel, a source of light and heat, a magnet. Adventurous, amorous, fecund, and over six feet tall, she possesses magical powers. She also has the greenest of thumbs, creating a tropical habitat in an arctic clime, and she possesses a wicked trigger finger.
When Curva had ridden into Weed on one of her horses two years earlier, she was like a vision from a surrealistic western with a parrot perched on each shoulder and a goat following. Curva’s glittering gold tooth flashed, and she wore turquoise rings on each finger. A rainbow-striped serape hung from one shoulder. Curva also wore a flat-brimmed black hat and carried a rifle along with six-shooters. Continue reading “Giving birth to fictional characters”
With four novels under my belt, I’ve spent lots of time thinking about how writers create believable characters that readers want to hang out with. Not surprisingly, there isn’t any formula to follow. For me, characters start from a seed that might have had a previous life in someone I actually know in real life. But just as often, that seed started with a name or a vague idea and evolved from there. 
Francine Prose’s novel Mr. Monkey has taught me something valuable about point of view. While I’m interested in the story Prose is telling, as a writer I’m even more concerned with how the narrative is shaped. Unusual for a novel, eleven chapters each feature a different character, and some appear tangentially in other sections, offering a fuller look at many of these actors. 
Where do fictional characters come from? I’ve been asking myself that question for as long as I’ve been writing, but the complete answer still evades me. The process is as mysterious as the origins of life itself, maybe even more so. At least we know that life on earth evolved from some primordial soup. But what concoction serves as the foundation for those who inhabit our stories? 
In contrast, Curva Peligrosa, from the novel of the same name that will be published in August 2017, didn’t have any connection to an actual person I have known. I just wanted to create a larger than life female character totally unlike me in almost every way. She is over six feet tall, amoral, fearless, powerful, and yet fully feminine. But it wasn’t until I stumbled on her name that she fully took shape in my mind.
