Creating Characters--the struggle is real

Woman of Sunlight

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Characters...
Make them goofy.
Make them charming.
Make them fierce.
Make them clueless.
Most of all…..Make them real.
And good luck with all of it.

Ilsa in my new release Woman of Sunlight, is a cross between Tarzan and Mogli from Jungle Book.
Yep, odd but true, and in a pretty, petite, adult woman.
But Ilsa has grown up wild. The closest she's had to a mother is seven years older than her.
Her big sister Ursula. And a sister, Jo who is five years older than her.
And they pretty much let her run wild. Ilsa tells stories, with wide eyed innocence to the man she ends up in a forced marriage to, of falling over waterfalls, being attacked by a bull elk, swinging through tree tops, wielding her knife.
When he threatens to panic, or yell...or maybe faint...she just can't figure out what's his problem.

So how do you make Ilsa into Mogli?
Tarzan?

One thing I struggled with, in Ilsa is making her an adult. It was easy to lapse into making her very childlike, because she's just never had any boundaries. No one's ever warned her of dangers. Mainly because her two big sisters...her mother figures...were children themselves and were running almost as wild as she was.

But of course Ilsa has to be an adult woman. The romance gets really weird otherwise, right?
Trust me, as the woman writing this, it does.

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So take none of her innocence away, but she's not stupid. She knows nature. She doesn't exactly know what goes on between a man and a woman, but she knows SOMETHING goes on, and she isn't going to be 'married' to Mitch in the intimate sense until she knows him a whole lot better than she does now.

So that gives her maturity. A lot of character creation is re-writing.
When I first wrote of Ilsa and Mitch's married relationship, I just had her be utterly clueless and misunderstand Mitch's attempts at kissing her and holding her.

That was nice.

Good night.

I thought it was funny, but re-reading it, it just didn't work. So Ilsa had to grow up. No woman who has lived as closely with nature as Ilsa Nordegren can fail to understand the facts of life.

Excerpt from Woman of Sunlight--Innocent but not childlike Ilsa:

His helpful hands reached for the buttons on the front of her dress and she slapped them away.

Mitch snatched his hands back like she’d drawn a gun instead of giving him the mildest of slaps.

She smiled. “I’d better have my say first.”

“What did you want to talk about?”

“I understood enough of what Ma said about a wedding night, and I know enough of the well, the world of…of animals and such, to know we aren’t going to…to…” She swallowed hard, then cleared her throat. Surprising how hard it was to say what should be obvious to him already…and yet she suspected it was not.

Squaring her shoulders, lifting her chin, determined to be clear and honest, she said, “We aren’t going to…behave…as a married couple until we’ve spent more time together. The way we ended up married isn’t at all the normal sort of way. I have no interest in you being…um.” She shrugged. “Being overly…familiar on so slight an acquaintance. We will spend the next little while becoming other than near strangers, Mitch. And only then will be carry on as married folks.”

His gaze held hers, then something shone in his eyes that seemed…agreeable.

“You’re right, Ilsa. Of course we shouldn’t rush into…married things. You’re a wise woman for such a sheltered little thing.” He rested one hand on her cheek and the other at the nape of her neck and kissed her.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back with great enthusiasm.

“Let’s get ready for bed now, shall we?”

“Last night I slept in this dress for reasons of speed and privacy, sharing a room with your ma, I’ll do the same tonight. I’m ready for bed right now, except for removing my boots.”

“I’d as soon wear my nightshirt.” He started unbuttoning.

Ilsa whirled away to look at the door. “This is so shocking for it to be all right for me to be in here tonight with you and your…your nightshirt…when last night it was wrong. Yes, the parson blessed our marriage. But that doesn’t change the fact that things have taken a shocking turn. It’s way more shocking than the time I came upon a bull elk in the woods and it charged and rammed me into a stream, and I almost went over a waterfall.”

Mitch made some sound she couldn’t understand and she wanted to look at him to see if he was scrubbing his face without water again. That sound seemed to go with the scrubbing.

But she didn’t dare look at him until he was done changing.

“All right. I’m done. I’m ready for bed. You can turn around.”

She did, but she turned to the side, away from him, sidled around him without looking at him, climbed into the bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. Only then did she look at him. He was standing there in a nightgown.

Except it was short. Far too short. She could see his knees and they were bare as a baby backside.

“Where are you going to sleep?” she asked.

Mitch started walking straight for the bed, and her.

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Brides of Hope Mountain Book #1

Another problem with Ilsa is, she's absolutely fearless. She's just never found a single thing she needed to do that she couldn't do.
And she'd never had a Mom scolding her, "Don't touch that, you'll burn yourself. Don't climb that tree, you'll fall. Don't carry that sharp knife around, you'll cut yourself."

Nope, her sisters let her run wild in the woods and she's good. She's woven roots and vines into swings. She knows where the trees grow so tightly she can make her way through the tree tops as quickly as she can run on the ground.

And part of being fearless is, she's incredibly tough.

Excerpt from Woman of Sunlight--Sheltered but tough Ilsa

Mitch had fallen asleep next to his brand-new wife so quickly, so suddenly, he had no memory of closing his eyes.

            And he was awakened in the first light of dawn by the blast of a train whistle.

            “It’s here.” He yanked Ilsa up but she was jumping halfway to the ceiling with a wild look of fear and something else. That feral look that made him worry she was going to pull her knife. But there was no time and she started getting her boots on before he had to decide if she was going to attack.

            He’d disarm her later.

            “That loud noise was made by the train. The man who will be boarding our horses, told us it might be in this morning. We’ve got to get out there before it leaves. It might not be back again for a week.”

They hadn’t unpacked much so they had everything stowed in a few seconds. They were breathing hard when they ran up to the station. The train was just pulling it, it’d begun whistling a fair distance out.

            Ilsa had heard the noise but didn’t see the train until they were up the steps to the station.

She shrieked at the huffing and puffing monster slowing down as it reached town. She whirled and dove for the edge of the platform.

            He stepped in her way and she smashed into him. With no time to spare and, their meager possessions in hand, he carried Ilsa along to buy a ticket.

Then Mitch hustled Ilsa toward the train. He tossed the satchels, bedrolls and his wife on board. Then dragged Ilsa into a seat. He dropped their baggage on the seat facing them.

“Ilsa.” The whistle blasted again. Ilsa dove over him. He snagged her and pinned her down until the blast ended.

The train car wasn’t overly full, thank heavens. No one seemed inconvenienced by the wrestling match he was having with his wife.

He smiled at about five curious passengers. “She’s never been on a train before.”

The one woman on board, a gray-haired matron next to a gray-haired man who was most likely her husband, asked, “Should you be sitting on her head like that?”

Ilsa started growling and he looked down at her savage eyes. He really hoped she didn’t pull her knife.

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Mitch has to learn to look at his delicate, innocent, little wife, and trust her.

Excerpt from Woman of Sunlight, Mitch respecting his wife as he gets to know her better.

She grabbed the woolen lapels of her warm coat and turned in a circle, looking up through tree branches blurred by ever heavier snowfall.

As she turned, a rifle barrel poked from behind a tree. Diving, she hit Mitch with all her weight. Surprise took him down more than her strength. As he tumbled over backward, a gun fired and fired again.

They landed with a thud on the rough, cold ground. Snow puffed up in a cloud around them.

Mitch swept her before him. He dragged her, though she was crawling fast enough he needn’t have. They got behind one of the old trees with a wide trunk just as a row of bullets cut into the bark.

Her knife filled her hand with no conscious decision to draw it.

Mitch’s pistol was out and in action. He fired.

Ilsa was too close to him. She knew from her years of hunting that if two targets were a distance apart, it was harder to hit both. Keeping the tree between her and the peppering gunfire, she reached overhead, snagged a low hanging limb and launched herself upward.

A hard hand grabbed her leg and yanked her to a halt. She looked down.

Mitch’s eyes met hers. He whispered, “Don’t kill him if you can help it.”

She nodded with one jerk of her chin, her heart almost hot with the respect he’d just shown her. Then her bossy husband let her go, turned back to the gunman and fired.

A fight is coming? He doesn't want to protect her from it, he wants her right in the middle of it, guarding his flank.
So Ilsa being tough and innocent, and that being reflected back at her by Mitch's growing respect for her, creates a character who to me, came off the page in a three dimensional way.

Read your book for character? Are they stereotypes? Are they too...and that word goes for everything.
TOO
Too flawed.
Too perfect.
Too unfailingly faithful.
Even...Too evil. Villains are more interesting if, in their evil ways, there's a reason for them to be that way and not just cartoon villains.

Today we talk character. Look at your own Work in Progress.
What can you do to bring your character to life?
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And Happy March, talk about 'The struggle is real'. We've almost survived another winter!!!