Using Research to Develop Believable Characters
Fully understanding your protagonists’ background, education, and experience will keep them consistent.
For me, one of the fun parts of writing mystery novels and short stories is putting my hero in impossible situations and then figuring out how to extricate them realistically. To keep the main character’s behavior consistent and to display how they would resolve a complex problem, I believe their background, personality, and experience must be fully developed.
And that’s where the research comes in.
For example, the main character in two of my historical mystery novels, Charles Goodfoote, is a mixed-blood (Blackfoot-Irish) Pinkerton detective. Because the main action in one novel takes place in San Francisco shortly after the Civil War, I needed him to be somewhat erudite to be able to match wits with the affluent group of malefactors who control the city.
As he was raised in a Blackfoot encampment for his first ten years, getting him a Harvard education in the mid-19th century presented a challenge.
The first phase of his journey wasn’t difficult. His village was attacked by the Army, who spared him because of his light skin, thinking he was a White who had been kidnapped. The soldiers sold…
