Character Development in a Series / Karen Randau

Whether you’re writing a standalone book or a series, you need believable characters who cause the reader to feel something. The characters must change—from weak to strong, devastated to overcoming, or lonely to thriving in a satisfying relationship.

In each book of a series, the change should unfold before the reader’s eyes to create a satiating experience. Characters should travel a believable arc from book to book, and each book is a building block to who the character has become.

Believable Characters Show Relatable Traits

Your key characters need certain characteristics.

• While often larger than life, they must be relatable to evoke the reader’s empathy, and they are never perfect.

• They encounter obstacles and conflicts and have a huge dose of fear, but they develop into someone who faces their instead of shrinking away.

• They fail, but they learn from their failures and overcome the obstacles you’ve put in their path.

Start with a Name

Names matter more in allegories than in commercial fiction but give your characters’ names a lot of thought.

Ethel is a good name for a woman born in the early twentieth century, but horrible for a contemporary girl. I often Google popular baby names of the timeframe and geography of my character’s birth. Research the name’s meaning.

If you want a character who is Slavic, big, strong, and violent, choose a Slavic name that Americans could pronounce and means something similar to your character’s description. For example, the Slavic name Nicholai is a variant of Nicholas and means victorious; conqueror of the people. You could use either version. Don’t forget to Google the first and last names together to ensure the combination doesn’t belong to a famous person.

Help Readers Visualize the Character

Sure, you must know the basic physical characteristics of all your characters (hair, eye, and skin color in addition age, height, build, piercings, tattoos, the sound of the voice, and physical imperfections). Advanced writers let the reader visualize the character in their own way rather than spelling out how the writer envisions the person. When possible, reveal physical characteristics through action and dialogue (showing) rather than by telling these traits (and not by the character looking in a mirror).

Backstory: Where a Series Becomes a Challenge

Backstory is everything that happened to your character before Chapter One and is what shaped that person into who they are today. You need not tell their whole backstory, and tell little—if any—in chapter one.

For my antagonist, protagonist, and key supporting characters, I create a one or two-page summary of their birth, siblings, where they grew up, educational level, political affiliation, spiritual beliefs, occupation, income, goals, skills/talents, friends, strengths, weaknesses, triggers, flaws, hobbies/pleasures, and anything important to their personality. Pick the few most relevant and reveal them through action and dialogue.

In my summary I like to include a photo I find online, but I avoid revealing who I envisioned in my writing. Let the reader imagine your characters for themselves.

Keep track of how characters in a series change from book to book. If you’ve planned an entire series, plot the character arc from the beginning of book one until the end of the final edition. If your process is to develop your story and characters as you write, think through the character arc for each book and keep it consistent with the previous books.

In my Rim Country Mystery series, protagonist Rita Avery started as a naïve, shallow person who cared more about fashion than her neighbors, and she rarely questioned the motives of her lying husband. The challenges and obstacles in the first book changed her, and the events in following books continued her transformation. By the fourth book, Rita is a savvy and compassionate private investigator who carries both a gun and anti-anxiety medication because of what happened in the first book.

You can find templates online for character development. Feel free to use the worksheet I developed for myself, found at http://www.karenrandau.com/character-development/. For a series, update your character summary with each book to provide greater depth and to decide which traits and backstory to highlight in your work-in-progress.

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Karen Randau started writing as a way of life as soon as a teacher taught her to print Run Spot Run. She received a degree in journalism/public relations from the University of Texas at Austin, and had a career that spanned the industries of high tech, mental health, and nearly three decades at Food for the Hungry. Later, a seed of an idea turned into her debut novel, Deadly Deceit, the first in the Rim Country Mystery series, published in June 2016. The series now also includes Deadly Inheritance (January 2017) and Deadly Choices (July 2017). For more information, visit http://www.karenrandau.com/.

No Fear, Ish / Robert Mangeot

In fall here, the yellow garden spiders come out. If you live anywhere in North America, you may know the beasties I mean: monster ladies in monster webs, their bodies over an inch long and their leg span a couple inches more. When summer breaks, for a few weeks they make a hunting ground of my eaves and shrubs. Despite her size, this queen lady is harmless other than to the imagination.

Most of my life I’ve been afraid of spiders. Those darting legs. Creepy egg sacs. Venom, maybe. You never know in your fear place, do you? Yep, I steered clear of little spiders, big spiders, spiders on floors, spiders in webs, leggy spiders that aren’t technically even spiders but really harvestmen but try telling that to my racing pulse. Whatever is next-level down from the full-on willies, that was me and spiders. Less so recently, and for an unexpected reason: I wrote about one.

A few years ago, I was doing passive idea-gathering on the internet (less charitably, goofing off), and I came across an article on giant tropical spiders who ate birds. A legit article from a legit source with legit pictures of the feasting in-progress. Genus Nephila, the article went. Forget my local ladies. A nephilid can boast a two-inch plus tubular body and a leg span wide around as your dinner plate, and the rain forest-y parts of Queensland and Southeast Asia are lousy with them. Birds, bats, snakes, all on her menu. Banana spiders are the common name, though more poetic minds dubbed them the Golden Orb Weaver. Their webs are super-strong and perfect for industrial uses from military to clothing to surgical supplies, which was the story hook: spider silk the stuff biotech dreams are made of.

Did I mention a leg span wide as your dinner plate? Go ahead. See for yourself. These ladies stalk plenty of YouTube clips. Inspired if freaked out, I put a giant nephilid at the heart of what became “Queen and Country,” published in the March 2018 Mystery Weekly. In the story’s early drafts, the spider queen was this malevolent force the principals searched in vain—and at some risk—to bag for Big Science. I gave the spider extra size and, with creative license, that serious venom to boot. No, my subconscious and I didn’t spare her any shock factor.

Something else happens when honing an idea: research. You know, facts and stuff. I studied nephilid diet, reproduction, hunting and feeding, day vs. nocturnal behavior, how she might walk, how she would behave in various weather conditions. And I studied her webs, the elaborate architecture spun in sun-glinting patterns, the parchment-y decorations she weaves in— stabilimenta, I would learn—that still baffle arachnologists as to exact purpose. Here was where the surprises started. The more real-world behavior I worked into my devil spider, the more rounded she became on the page. The more vulnerable. I came to root for her.

Research gives me more than just a better story. What I learn stays with me long after I’ve typed The End. I came to tolerate a spider encounter, to trap-and-release or live-and-let-live. After all, if there are spiders around, that means there’s lots of stuff spiders eat around, and those critters would be the root problem, wouldn’t they?

Look, I won’t claim to be cuddly with the things. If a house spider crawled on me now, I would leap none-too profile in courage from my chair. But I’ve come to enjoy our sharing space, with my local giant ladies especially. Every fall, my non-bird-eating queens break cover and spend their regal nights under my porch eaves. Last year, I described our resident queen’s stabilamenta pattern and web structure to my wife, how the spider would have to take her capture silk down soon, what with rain on the way. My wife asked how the hell I knew all that. And why, she didn’t add aloud.

Great questions.

The longer I’m at this whole writing thing, the more I realize what’s behind the ideas that I keep after. A desire to understand and, maybe in some cases, overcome. Thanks to a short story, these days I greet my fall spider friends with no fear. Ish.

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Robert Mangeot lives in Franklin, Tennessee with his wife and cats. His short fiction appears here and there, including

ALFRED HITCHCOCK MYSTERY MAGAZINE, LOWESTOFT CHRONICLE, Mystery Writers of America's ICE COLD, and the

Anthony-winning MURDER UNDER THE OAKS. His story "The Cumberland Package" was a finalist in the 2017 Derringer

Awards. He proudly serves as current chapter president for Sisters in Crime Middle Tennessee. When not writing, he

can be found wandering the snack food aisles of America or France.

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Column, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)

Thanks to Joseph Borden and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s editorial.