 When you're writing fiction. What's your first name? Hi Maddie. She said when you when you're writing fiction How do you create character and how do you avoid creating? Same old character That's a hard one next question for mr. Can't You write a lot about this in on writing I think that I Think that the way that I would answer that is first of all you start with the idea that for most of us We think that we're we're good guys. We think we're the good guys. We think we're on the side of angels and so My idea is everybody has some part of their character That's admirable. I'm sure that at one time or another Theodore Bundy helped an old lady across the street, of course He probably raped and murdered her on the other side, but that's that what I'm talking about That's the yin yin and yang of it. So I have a tendency to start Totally Unjudgmental I and that's that that's part of the benefit of working story rather than plot Our lives develop naturally and our characters develop naturally over a period of time And they are influenced by a lot of different characteristics and the way that we look at other people is Influenced to over a period of time as we get to know them Sometimes women that you didn't think were You know particularly good looking you get to know them the more you see them the more you say after all you say oh That woman is pretty and then a year or two later. You say that woman is really beautiful But I didn't see that at first. Do you say some guy? Well, he's just a guy and He's sort of just somebody else that happened to be at this party or in this dorm or whatever And you get to talk to those people a little bit the personality starts to come forward and you start to see The shadows and the depth of things. I've got a character and Mr. Mercedes whose whose name is Holly Gibney and I expected it to be a walk-on Okay, she's this 47 year old woman who still lives with her aging mother and She's got psychological problems and she never speaks above up a Mumble in fact, she's introduced in the book is Holly the mumbler Because she's one of these people we've seen this person. We've all seen this person You can't really say what they're saying you can't really hear what they're saying and they have a tendency to sort of avoid eye contact They might look up every now and then Say a little bit They might have certain ticks habits So I thought to myself Well, I've got a great line for this This this lady The first time that my main character meets her is that a holiday in a restaurant where he thinks she orders a sneeze burger Because she speaks so low. She's actually ordering a cheeseburger So I thought she was a walk-on. I thought she was a flat character little by little She's become more and more important to me and more fun to write about and I started to see that she has an interior life and You begin by observing we I mean You have to look Raise your hand again if you're in the writing courses You have to look you have to see I Mean you can't just Walk and let it all go by it's somebody some of it. This has got to stay you've got to see how people are You've got a look for the person who When they eat they have a tendency to look down at their plate and they're tearing their napkins Have you ever seen a napkin ripper? Okay, or somebody who is in a cafeteria and they've kind of like got the straw in pieces Holly is a lipstick biter kind of like this all the time kind of a She'll talk through her nails So it's it's part of the fun of it to me is to see better and see more you know that famous flanger O'Connor Line about this she says there's a certain grain of stupidity the writer can hardly do without yeah And that is the quality of having to stare. Yeah, so you're hearing you say for Everybody's that when you create character you're really fueled by curiosity not answers. That's right You want to see them grow and they do their own thing if you let them if you let them do their own thing and one of the things that drives me crazy about second and third rate fiction is When a writer will wind a character up and make them go through certain paces And I think why don't you just go back and cut out paper dolls