Guest Post: So Many Characters, So Few Words: Keeping Multiple Characters Memorable in Short Fiction by Eleanor Cawood Jones

Please welcome author Eleanor Cawood Jones back to the blog today as she discusses her participation in the new book, Murder in the Mountains: A Destination Murders Short Story Collection. The anthology comes out on February 1, 2022.

 

So Many Characters, So Few Words: Keeping Multiple Characters Memorable in Short Fiction

Writing is a weird gig. Sometimes you find yourself staring at a blank page, and sometimes you have so much material you don’t even know where to start. And still other times, you wind up with so many characters in your head you have to pick and choose who gets onto the pages, and how to keep them all straight for the reader—and for yourself. That was the dilemma I faced in my most recent writing binge, slated for the upcoming Murder in the Mountains.

Last year on Kevin’s blog, I talked about setting in “Cabo San Loco” (Murder on the Beach). In that story, I introduced five women characters who had bonded and become friends when they were on a sequestered jury during a traumatic trial. Afterward, one character decided to treat all of them, plus my narrator, Lorrie, to a vacation in Cabo San Lucas so they could move past it all. (Since this is mystery fiction, that vacation turned out to be a little stressful as well, as you can imagine.)

“Cabo” was well received, and I was delighted when I was invited to contribute to the next book in the Destination Murders series, Murder in the Mountains. I am pleased to say all six women—Lorrie, Martha, Bean, Book, Karin, and Ashley—are back for another vacation in “The Lyin’ Witch in the Wardrobe.”

On any jury, you’ll find a variety of ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds among the jurors, and our friends are no different. The youngest, Ashley, is 24, and Karin is a proud senior grandma. Three characters are in their thirties and one—celebrity Cidne “Bean” Dupont—in her forties. It’s fun to play with the life experiences of such a varied cast, but challenging to help the reader remember who they all are throughout a novelette-length story.

In “Cabo,” all the characters listed bucket list items at the beginning of the story, to create differences among them. I also gave a few of them nicknames. Bean for example, gets her well-deserved nickname because she always introduces herself as “Cidne, rhymes with kidney, like the bean.” But for Mountains, I needed to bring fresh identifiers to distinguish everyone. You can’t just repeat the same information from story one when you’re expecting most readers will already have read it.

I’m going to stop right here and salute every writer who has an ongoing series and faces this with every book. Kudos, hugs, gifts, etc. to you all.

The answer of how to keep old characters fresh and unique came in the form of a pretty weird place. A Wizard of Oz convention.

Back when I was a kid, there was this amazing theme park in the gorgeous mountains of Western North Carolina called Land of Oz. It went defunct in 1980, but enough people loved it that the owners began having reunion weekends each September, and it’s turned into a pretty big thing. I went there for research in September and stayed nearby in a castle hotel—and went to a touristy gem mine to boot. It’s the stuff dream settings are made of, and all those places have a key role in “The Lyin’ Witch in the Wardrobe.”

I didn’t find an actual Oz convention on my research trip, but I did invent one, and I finally decided the best way to tell the characters apart was to put them in costume for the weekend. The story opens in the castle hotel with the narrator, Lorrie George, enjoying her sparkly Glinda costume, while her bestie Martha McBain is mad about having to be the Wicked Witch of the West, complete with green makeup. They’re having a loud argument, and the other characters in costume enter one by one to find out what’s going on.

Glinda, the Wicked Witch, Dorothy, the Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion are all in costume because they’re getting ready for a photo op before the convention. I thought it would be tricky inventing reasons to keep them in costume for most of the weekend, but it’s such an over-the-top scenario it turned out to be easy.

It then became logical to introduce more characters and also put them in costume. There’s an entire bevy of wicked witches staying in the castle, including one sporting an extra-large pair of ruby slippers with real stones that she never takes off, and those slippers are coveted by all her witch friends. Her nickname turned out to be Squatch, short for Sasquatch (because we’re in bigfoot country here, people). Another character, Uncle Gummy, has ill-fitting dentures and sports a winged-monkey suit.

And just as I thought I had it figured out, in my head trouble showed up when a tour bus pulled up to the castle containing a celebrity who had heard about the Oz convention and was crashing the party. She wants the ruby slippers most of all, and she’s creating a LOT of jealousy for one of my jurors as well. I tried to make her memorable too, but will skip the details here in the interest of not creating a spoiler. I will report though, that happily beta readers found the banter about her quite amusing.

I think I succeeded in making everyone at the castle and in Oz memorable. They have their own personalities, opinions and romances—quite a bit of romance in this whodunnit—and I enjoyed tremendously seeing the story unfold. (That’s a punster thing; when you don’t plot thoroughly, you often find out what’s happening the same time the reader does. I get a lot of joy out of that, because I’m not committed to one direction. But that’s another subject for another day.)

Along the way, I changed my mind about both the murder and murderee and who wore what shoes. So I had to edit myself before the editor edited me, if you know what I mean. But these things happen and the story is better for it.

I can only hope readers have as much fun with this crazy cast as I did dreaming them up and walking them onto paper. If so, my job is done. This is my fourth story featuring Lorrie and Martha, reluctant amateur sleuths, and, if response is good, I look forward to writing a fifth. (Okay, fine. I’m already writing it.)

Murder in the Mountains comes out Feb. 1 and is set for a pre-order price of 99 cents on ebook. There will be a print version as well. Over the moon to share my eight co-authors: Gretchen Archer, Leslie Budewitz, Karen Cantwell, Barb Goffman, Tina Kashian, Shari Randall, Shawn Reilly Simmons, and Cathy Wiley. The stories are novelette length, cover all four seasons, and set in a variety of gorgeous mountain settings around the world. 

 

Eleanor Cawood Jones ©2022

Eleanor Cawood Jones is a self-proclaimed romance novelist who somehow only writes short crime fiction. She won a 2021 Derringer Award for “The Great Bedbug Incident and the Invitation of Doom” (Chesapeake Crimes: Invitation to Murder). Her character Lorrie George has previously appeared in “Brayking Glass” (Murder by the Glass), “Cabo San Loco” (Murder on the Beach), and The Importance of Being Unrest (Wildside Press).

A former newspaper reporter and reformed marketing director, Tennessee native Eleanor lives in Virginia and travels frequently.