Welcome Guest Blogger ~ Robin lee Hatcher

The winner of the Christy Award for Excellence in Christian Fiction, the RITA Award for Best Inspirational Romance, and the RWA Lifetime Achievement Award, Robin Lee Hatcher is the author of over 50 novels. She lives in Idaho. For more information, visit her website and her Write Thinking blog.




I’d like to begin by saying thanks to Ane for asking me to guest blog on Novel Journey this week. She told me I could blog about anything so I thought I would take a quick look at creating “real” characters.

I’m an intuitive writer who works without an outline. It’s my characters who determine where a story is going and what they will say or do. Thus it is important for me to know them well. Knowing them well is what helps me keep them real, and keeping them real is of great importance to me as an author.

Recently, a reader on Amazon.com had this to say about Return to Me, my new novel: “One of the things I really like about Robin Lee Hatcher's books is that her characters are real people. They are not some kind of perfect Christians that make you feel like you aren't quite good enough. This book is no exception.”

As far as I’m concerned, this is the best kind of compliment a reader can give me. I want my characters to be as real to my readers as they are to me.

Return to Me is a modern day parable of a prodigal daughter and her “perfect” sister. In the fall of 2004, I was in a hotel in Illinois, awaiting a visit to a Christian television station for an interview, when Roxy Burke entered my mind with these lines:

There exists a strange moment between sleep and wakefulness when dreams cease and realism remains at bay. That was when Roxy’s heart spoke to her.
It’s time to go home.
Roxanne Burke had given Nashville seven years to discover her. She’d offered her voice, her face, her fortune—and eventually, her body—but despite her desperate grasps at the brass ring, country music and stardom didn’t want her.
Roxy was worse than a has-been. She was a never-was.

I cannot tell you if I knew at that moment that Roxy was a prodigal child or that she had a sister who did all the right things, but I discovered it soon afterward as I allowed the idea to germinate in my imagination.

I try not to hurry the process at this point. I try to play “angel’s advocate” to whatever comes into my mind about the story or the people in it. Rather than thinking why something or someone won’t work, I consider the reasons the ideas might work.

That’s what I did with Roxy Burke. I let her speak to me about her childhood and her relationship with her family – grandmother, mother, father, and sister – from the time she was born right up to the moment she woke up in Nashville in a state of despair.

The writing tool I use most often in creating believable, “breathing” characters is the first person autobiography. I write these any time in the early process of the new book, sometimes before writing chapter one but almost always by the time I’ve written chapter three. I use the “stream of consciousness” method with my autobiographies. The rule is to write without stopping to think or edit. The opening line goes something like this:

My name is Roxanne Burke, but everybody calls me Roxy. I was born in Boise, Idaho on April 4, 1974. My dad is Jonathon Burke and my mom’s name was Carol. I’ve got an older sister, Elena. When I was little, maybe three or four, I used to…

I let my imagination run free as the character tells her story, from birth to the moment the book opens. Most of the things I discover about my characters will never make it into the book. Most of it is unimportant to anyone other than the character and me, her creator.

When you know a character well, when you know all the little things that went into shaping her into the person she is today (remember, we are all the sum total of what has happened to us in the past), then I will always know how she will react – and why – in any given situation. And this is how I create “real” characters for my readers.

I hope you’ll come to care for Roxy and Elena and the rest as you read Return to Me, and I hope you’ll find each one of them real.




NJ: To read a review of Return To Me, visit: http://www.novelreviews.blogspot.com/