What the Well-Dressed Character Will Wear, by Susan Oleksiw

A standard technique to introduce a new character is to provide a physical description--height, weight, hair color--with one unique feature, perhaps a broken nose or uneven shoulders. This is the easy part, but it is hardly enough if we want the reader to get a sense of how this person sees himself or herself in the world. We need to know more, and writers may progress to how the person shakes hands or drives a car. I include clothing in the details that have the potential for making a character vivid.

During a recent visit to a local mall, I found a spot where I could watch the shoppers and other people watchers. I spotted the senior citizens taking their daily walk, the young mothers with kids in tow, eager to get out of the house even if it meant carting half the neighborhood with them to the play room, and shoppers looking for--and finding--bargains. None of these individuals is real to you now reading this because I haven't given any remarkable detail. You don't know what they look like or how they behave.

Most of the characters who populate my fiction appear fully formed--I know what they look like and how they behave and what they believe. But I also want to know what they are wearing. Whatever the reason, I have to think harder about my characters' outfits. The only exception is Anita Ray, most recently in For the Love of Parvati. I understand her wardrobe well. She wears a full sari, a two-piece Kerala sari, or a salwar khameez set. Sometimes she wears western clothes--slacks and a khurta. In her case I only have to think about colors and patterns.

Western characters are more of a challenge. I am so used to seeing people wearing jeans and jerseys that I have to remind myself that there are other options. I find some of these at the mall or in restaurants or movie theaters. An especially good site for searching out wardrobe possibilities is the train station. I don't mind waiting for the less-regular train service leaving North Station in Boston because I take the time to study the outfits of professional women. They are varied and sometimes surprising.

Women have a far wider range in clothing now than in years past, and I have a few favorites. Many women still wear business suits, particularly those raised in traditional families determined to maintain hard-won family status. Deanie Silva, in Last Call for Justice, would only wear the most expensive but slightly conservative clothes. But her nieces would wear anything but. 

For the younger age group, which includes Jenny, Chief of Police Joe Silva's stepdaughter, I especially like the silk blouses with jeans, the black leather boots with flowery cotton dresses, the leggings on stick-thin legs with layers of tops, the leggings and long flowing skirts with cowboy shirts. Thought it's not for Sarah Souza, one of Joe's nieces, I have admired the white silk slip, with lace, worn underneath a red sweater embroidered with flowers. I can't say I have admired the combat boots worn with a khaki dress slung with empty gun holsters beneath lips pierced at least five times with silver studs but I remember the woman who wore the outfit. She may appear in another book, but not as a relative.

Whatever I may think of these outfits on a personal level (hint: they will never appear in my closet), I know I have a character who will love at least one of them. And however I describe her, with long brown hair or green eyes that recall Elizabeth Taylor's, the reader will remember the outfit that says, this young lady knows who she is. And that's how vivid I want my characters to be.

Keeping Up with Your Characters

The hardest part of writing crime fiction has turned out to be something I didn’t expect, and something I’ve only now, after nine novels, started to think about. Working out some of the clues in the third Anita Ray novel, For the Love of Parvati, taught me some important lessons about keeping up with my characters. 

In graduate school I read through all of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novels without ever being troubled by the woman’s age, or her failure to age along with the world around her. The elderly woman of the 1930s accepting invitations to weekend parties in the country was the elderly woman of the 1950s exploring the new housing developments on the edge of the village. In contrast I also read Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford series, and enjoyed the subplot of the inspector’s personal life, including the challenges of dealing with his growing children.

When I started writing the Mellingham series with Chief of Police Joe Silva, I hadn’t considered how his life would change. He was a man in his fifties when he walked onto the page, and I thought I would find enough murderous business while he was in that decade to not worry about anything else. I was wrong. He fell in love at the end of the third book in the series, Family Album, and his beloved came with a ready-made family.

Things have evolved differently for Anita Ray. I hadn’t given much thought to her getting married and starting a family, but I assumed that would happen, and was waiting for the right setting to develop. But again, I was wrong. Instead of the traditional passage, Anita becomes more deeply involved in photography. She appeared as a photographer in the first line of the first story, and in every adventure she’s using her camera to solve crimes.

Anita uses a Pentax because I use one. I have my eye on another camera but that will have to wait. Meanwhile I find myself trying to keep up with Anita. She’s curious, so she has opened her camera to see if there’s anything wrong inside. Professional guidebooks always warn against this, but Anita doesn’t take advice. And apart from the advice for beginners, professional photographers like to know their equipment intimately. This was a challenge for me, but I rose to it and opened my camera and took a look inside.

Anita looks at everyone and everything as though she were looking through a lens. This gives her distance and a sense of the narrative of what she’s looking at. To her everything is an image, and everyone is telling a story.

For a while Anita has had a gentleman friend, someone her aunt doesn’t approve of. This has provided me with numerous opportunities to play with Auntie Meena’s prejudices and frustrated dreams as a mother and marriage broker. But the man in question is leaving Anita in Book 4, and will not return as her beloved.

Anita runs a photography gallery, which brings her a modest income and gets her out of her aunt’s Hotel Delite, with its attendant duties and mini crises. I have mounted two photography exhibits for a local library gallery, so I know how much work it takes. I’ve also submitted to juried shows (and been accepted for a few).

I’m keeping up with Anita, but just barely. For each story I have to learn about and do more with my camera. Usually when writers talk about characters getting away from them, they mean the characters say unexpected things. With Anita, she veers off in directions as a photographer that make me scramble to keep up. She forces me to learn, and perhaps in the end I’ll be as good a photographer as I think she is.

For more about Susan and the Anita Ray series, including links to her books, go to http://www.susanoleksiw.com

One More Step in Making a Series Live

I don’t remember the first time I heard the admonition, Don’t judge a book by its cover. I have always felt I was open minded and tried not to be judgmental when evaluating an idea or meeting someone new. But when it comes to books, I think I do judge a book by its cover. And I’m not the only one.

I didn’t come to this conclusion until it was forced on me. There’s nothing like having someone point out the obvious for waking me up. And that’s what a friend did recently, when she pointed out that the covers for the Mellingham books don’t look like they’re part of a series. Really? Maybe that’s because someone who knows nothing about graphic arts designed some of them. Me.

I have had four publishers for the Mellingham series, four publishers with four different design groups designing covers in hard cover, trade paperback, mass market paperback, and large print. Coherence was not anyone’s goal, and it showed. Since I put the books up on Kindle and Nook, I had to produce covers for them, and these are the ones that have been hanging around for a couple of years. But no longer.

Thanks to a good friend and wonderful designer, the Mellingham series, two of which were published by Five Star, now have a set of covers that tell the reader/buyer that these books belong together, and in this order.

I have had to give up the belief that all readers are like me. If I want to read a book on a particular topic, or by a specific author, I don’t care what the cover looks like. But not everyone goes to the bookstore, or library, or on line, with a list of books to corral. But even I don’t do that all the time. I browse just like anyone else; I pull books off the shelves if I like the look of the cover.

A good cover tells the reader the kind of book to expect. No reader will find a buxom 1950s female form sprawled on the cover of a Mellingham book in the style of Mickey Spillane. Nor will a reader find what one editor called “the cookbook cover,” an array of little hints about clues, on one of my books. That isn’t me and that isn’t Mellingham. There is humor but it isn't the defining feature of the book. The stories move from light to dark and sometimes swing back and forth.

The new covers do exactly what a cover should do. The covers tell the reader that this is a traditional mystery story, set in a small New England town, with little blood or gore. It is not a thriller or a violent series. These are stories about place and the kind of people who live in small New England towns.

A good cover is the result of a designer who “gets” the story. My publishers have all had good designers who “got” the story, but after so many books and so many different designers, it was time to make the covers uniform as well as informative. And now they are, with grateful thanks to Kathleen Valentine and her many talents.

Presenting the covers here also brings me near to the end of a process that I've been documenting here on Author Expressions. The Mellingham series has offered me as a writer challenges--how to continue this series while developing a new one and writing other stories that are independent of both? How to keep the series alive without a publisher? How to promote a series in this new publishing world?

There are a few steps left, and I'll be reporting on those also on Author Expressions. But right now I'm enjoying the new look of the series and enjoying the feeling of a fresh start.