Characters should be----well 'Characters'

Volumes have been written about how characters can give that extra spice to a novel, and because that's true, every author spends hours honing and developing the secondary players in their novels. Why? Think of a hit novel---say Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. In my opinion, the real, but almost unbelievable characters in that book, put it in the extraordinary category. I don't know about other sections of the country, but the South is full of characters. We've got some real ring-tail-tooters down here, and most southern authors have very little difficulty thinking up a special secondary player for their novels. All they have to do is think back to their hometown and sit down at the word processor. Maybe it's something in the water, air, or inbreeding, but every southern town I've every been in has yards and yards of these guys and gals.

When I started writing my novel, The Red Scarf, I took out a pad and made notes about every character I grew up with in the small village of Norphlet. After the manuscript was accepted for publication, I met with the publishers and we sat around the table and discussed the novel. One of them asked, "How did you come up with such colorful characters?" I smiled and said, "I didn't make them up. They were just some of the folks from my home town." I guess when a novel has characters such as Peg, the one-legged pool hall owner, Wing, his one-armed brother, the town marshal, Doc, the wheelchair ridden newsstand owner who pretends he's president Roosevelt, and Big Six, the wild sorry roughneck, it's a little hard to believe they all lived in a little village of 650 folks. But they did.

Maybe fictitious characters work for some authors, but as far as I'm concerned you can't beat the real thing.