Happy Wednesday, all!

Today I’m delving deep into something I enjoy in urban fantasy/paranormal romance–the cast of characters. If you’ve read Charlaine Harris or Patricia Briggs, you know their books include zany, interesting, and even scary characters. You read the books to keep up their activities–or even their demise…

I love taking the protagonist and then expanding out from that one person to give them friends and family to help them resolve their conflict. They make the book richer and much more interesting. In my book, my heroine Natalya has a noisy and eccentric family. Other than the fact that they are werewolves, each person has their own lives and quirky things that they do. When I’m building my cast of characters for a book, I don’t really plot them out. That wouldn’t be any fun. The most fun moments during writing are when I’m sitting at the computer and I let my imagination go wild. I don’t plan out names either. The first name that comes to mind is attached to my character. (Of course, this can be a problem if you name your hero Matt and your heroine’s nickname is Nat. Yeah. Matt and Nat sound weird as hell. Matt became Thorn.)

As the story unfolds, Natalya runs into them and they just start acting like good ole Uncle Boris or that grumpy Uncle Vladimir. Other than using my own family as examples, I also observe others around me. In the store. In the parking lot. Even television gives me never ending ideas. Take any reality show where people lose their common sense and you have ideas galore on how to make a scene snappy. Friends or relatives can also supply you with hours upon hours of ideas. You just need to dig deep and tap into those ideas and build a character. Have fun with it!

Here’s an example. Say I want my heroine to be able to get buy a weapon, but of course, she needs to get one from a special dealer since that’s the only place in town that carries that particular thing. Now it would be easy and cliché to use the sleazy gun dealer idea. Been there, seen that on television. I not only want to make this hard for the heroine since she’s in a hurry, but I want the reader to have fun: so how about a nice elderly lady behind the counter? She looks innocent enough as I describe her. The kind of woman who would bake you cookies and help kids cross the street. But this Grandma is a gun/knife dealer. I want her candy-coated voice to spout crazy stuff like, “If you want to kill that rat bastard, Sweetie, you need to go with a serrated edge every time, I tell ya. You’ll spread his innards across the highway like Southern-fried roadkill.” She says all of this with a warm smile like she’s talking about the weather. I could make things easy and let the heroine buy the weapon, but no, my grandma wants the heroine to buy the Rambo ass-kicking knife version and not the simple Wham-Bam-Thank-You-Ma’am model. Soon enough, a choice is made. After Grandma bags up the purchase, she even throws in a free gift. “Here’s a little something extra. I got one for each of my granddaughters for Christmas. A brand new Gerber 06 Manual Combat Folder knife. Perfect edge for cutting.”

The fun thing about urban fantasy is that after I create this character I can always bring her back into the mix later in the story or even in another book. She is part of my universe now and will help make sure I stay out of dullsville.

So where are your characters born? How do you build yours?