Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story. (19 page)

T
ake an ordinary person, add a dash of magic, and you have a supernatural character, right? Well … that's a start. You might want a few other ingredients, too. In this section, we'll discuss creating fun, welldeveloped protagonists with supernatural elements.

Always keep firmly in mind that people read any novel, no matter what the genre, to find out what happens next to a fascinating set of characters. And no, throwing some magic into an otherwise dull-as-dirt character won't make her fascinating. They need to be fascinating people on their own. So how do you do that?

First, remember that
fascinating
doesn't necessarily mean
unusual
. Regular people can end up on the fascinating end of the scale. Cinderella and Aladdin start out as perfectly ordinary people, but their stories have lasted for generations. Terry Pratchett's
Unseen Academicals
relies on Glenda, a relentlessly ordinary baker. The people who buy the country home in Raymond E. Feist's
Faerie Tale
are a perfectly ordinary blended family. Charlie Asher of
A Dirty Job
by Christopher Moore is dreadfully ordinary. It's part of the point of his character.

I'm not saying you can't write about extraordinary people. Quite the contrary. It's just that handling intrinsically extraordinary protagonists like vampires and werewolves and wizards is a big topic that deserves its own chapter. We'll look at them more closely in chapter eight.

Two factors make ordinary people worth reading about.

You need to develop your protagonist, fully and completely. On one level, this means she should have a fully documented life, from birth to the present — where the character was born, where she went to school, who her childhood friends were, what her family was like back then and what it's like now, the first time she fell in love, and more. As the author, you need to know nearly everything that has happened to her. I say
nearly
because more ideas and possibilities will crop up as you write the book. Old lovers, forgotten cousins, photographs from long-ago vacations, and other detritus from the past can show up at any time to create conflict — or help the character in a moment of crisis.

All of the above are merely facts, however. You also need to develop the character's
attitudes
. Two kids survive Mrs. Futz's awful third grade class. One shrugs the whole thing off, and the other comes away hating school for the rest of his life. Which attitude would your main character have?

Glenda from
Unseen Academicals
leads an ordinary life doing an ordinary job. A homely, slightly overweight woman just this side of thirty, she runs the night kitchen at a university, reads piles of romance novels when no one's looking, and still has a teddy bear named Mr. Wobble. Except for the teddy bear, there's nothing extraordinary, or even interesting, about her. Pratchett
makes
her interesting through her attitudes. Glenda is eminently practical. She runs the night kitchen with an iron fist because she knows in her heart there is One Right Way to make pies, and that's how it shall be done. The practicality extends to keeping a close eye on her assistant Juliet, who is beautiful and therefore not quite trustworthy in practical or romantic matters, in Glenda's estimation. Glenda also sees to it that the elderly people in her neighborhood are checked on, fed, and aired out from time to time
because
someone has to do it, and if she doesn't, who will? All this endears her to the reader and makes her interesting to read about long before a hungry goblin shows up in her kitchen and things get a little strange.

Your own characters need to have the same sort of depth. This extends beyond work and hobbies. How does your main character see the world? What does she expect when something good happens? When something bad happens? How does she react to a challenge? To a loss? How does she fit into her neighborhood or other community? Knowing all this and more will allow you to write a three-dimensional character who will draw readers into a story, regardless of supernatural setup.

Take a look at the following checklist. You don't need to know everything on it, but you should be aware of most of them.