On a recent edition of First Draft Friday, I talked with bestselling author Mary Carroll Moore about how to incorporate yourself into your characters, how to write a non-stereotypical villain, how to write characters unlike yourself and more!
Here are some key takeaways from my conversation with Mary:
Incorporating personal traits into characters: Mary infuses her characters with elements of her own personality. For instance, her character Kate embodies her love for order and planning, while Red represents her rebellious and impulsive side. This technique of embedding personal traits into characters helps in creating relatable and multidimensional personalities.
Developing characters with depth: Mary emphasizes the importance of exploring the inner and outer lives of characters. She discusses how characters present themselves to the world versus their hidden emotions, histories, and traumas. This depth adds authenticity and complexity, making characters more engaging for readers.
Drawing inspiration from real life: Mary’s mother, a pilot in World War II, inspired the aviation background of her characters. This personal connection not only enriches the narrative but also brings authenticity to the story.
Balancing plotting and pantsing: Mary uses a hybrid approach to writing, combining plotting and pantsing. She starts with a storyboard to outline key plot points and then allows for spontaneous writing. This method helps her maintain a structured narrative while also tapping into creative intuition.
Creating believable villains: Writing convincing antagonists is challenging. Mary discusses the importance of avoiding stereotypes and giving villains human qualities. By exploring the character’s longing and motivations, she creates more nuanced and relatable antagonists. This approach ensures that even the “bad guys” have depth and credibility.
Writing characters unlike you: When writing characters outside her immediate experience, such as younger characters, Moore relies on feedback from her writing group and partners. Additionally, she reads extensively to understand how other authors portray similar characters.
It was a great discussion, one you won’t want to miss! Click below to watch our 30-minute recording and hear the questions we answered from the live audience. Keep scrolling if you’d prefer to read the transcript.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Alessandra Torre: Hi everyone, and welcome to our 70th episode of First Draft Friday. My name is Alessandra Torre. I’m your host with Authors AI, and today I am being joined by Mary Carolle Moore, who is a fellow author. And we are going to be talking all about ways that your characters can embody, some elements of yourself and your own personality. So I’m really excited to jump into this topic. Mary, it’s so fantastic to have you here. Can we start by just telling the audience a little bit about yourself and your writing journey?
Mary Carroll Moore: Definitely. Thank you for inviting me. I’m the Amazon bestselling author of 14 books in three genres, and I’m a former syndicated columnist with the LA Times. I moved to fiction in 2000, and my first novel was published in 2009. So this is a really new journey for me. The first novel was nominated for a Pen Faulkner Award. This current novel, called A Woman’s Guide to Search and Rescue, became a bestseller on preorders alone in August, and it was released in October. And my food career has been the backbone of my writing life. But I love fiction, and I’m so excited to be on the show and talk about characters. I teach writing throughout the US, and I have a very popular, if I can say that modestly, Substack newsletter every week on writing practice. And right now, I live in the New Hampshire mountains with my family. So, so glad to be here.
Alessandra Torre: It’s so great to have you here. We were chatting on the pre-show about the transition and writing nonfiction to fiction. So, your nonfiction works were food-based, so they were very informative. You didn’t have characters. So that was one of the things I would think when you were moving to fiction, you thought, okay, we have to have a plot and I have to have characters. As someone new, because a lot of our watchers run the gamut, we have very experienced authors, and we have a lot of newer and aspiring authors. But when you first made that transition and started working in fiction, how did you learn how to build a character or was that something that came innately?
Mary Carroll Moore: I love people so I’ve always been an observer of people, how they operate, how they move across a room, the expressions they use. And one of my big fascinations personally is how people present and then the reality behind that. So I think I was a natural for fiction because that’s what you do. You have your characters who present a certain way in the world in their lives, and then underneath that is their emotional life or their history or their trauma. And how much are they going to leak out of that inner world as they present to the world? So it’s always been an incredible journey for me to get the inner life of characters as well as the outer function of them in a story.
Alessandra Torre: I love that. We’ve had 70 episodes. I don’t think we’ve ever really talked about that. How someone presents versus. And do you feel every person has two sides, their inner and their outer? or just the serial killers and psychopaths that have two faces? I don’t feel I have a lot of deep, dark secrets, but there’s what I think and what I say. Those two things don’t always match.
Mary Carroll Moore: Right? And I think normally humans hide things. They are vulnerable. We’re vulnerable in the world, most of us. And so we assess the danger or the risk potential of an environment or people that we’re with. And we shelter ourselves. So that’s what I found with more positive characters. The main characters in my new novel, all three have secrets that they hide from themselves, even. And so part of the journey to write characters is to discover how to leak this information to the reader, even if the character is still unconscious of it. One of my characters longs for family and she’ll almost do anything to find family. And so she flees to her estranged sister when the law is after her, which is a totally stupid move because now she’s bringing this danger into her hopeful new family and she doesn’t realize it. So part of my job with this new novel was to create this character who is pretty unconscious of her self-absorption and how she’s going to affect this new family. So that was really cool. And then over the time of the novel, the trajectory changes, so she can start realizing herself as somebody that has brought danger to this group of people that she so wants to be a part of. And then what does she do with that information?
Alessandra Torre: I’m sorry, for those of you watching or listening to the replay, I should have asked you this to begin with, but just to ground them, can you? Because the title almost sounds like nonfiction. A Woman’s Guide to Search and Rescue, but can you just give us the synopsis of the book? Yes. And because you do have multiple main, are they multiple main characters?
Mary Carroll Moore: They’re three narrators, which is really complex.
Alessandra Torre: Are there three first-person narrators?
Mary Carroll Moore: No. They’re all third person in this book. Well, it’s about two estranged sisters who grow up in a fractured family. One of them was the legal daughter of a man who was a pilot. And he trained her on how to fly. And she became a search and rescue pilot in the mountains of northern New York, the Adirondacks. All her life, she’s wondered about her father’s lover, and she doesn’t know that her father’s lover had a daughter. And that’s the second narrator who is a musician and ends up being framed for a murder that she didn’t commit. So she has to flee. And the only place that she can think of going that nobody would know she’s there is this first woman’s house or her estranged sister who’s. And they’re both pilots. So she flies in and she tries to become family. The third person who is involved in this complicated story is the first woman’s daughter. So Kate’s daughter, Molly, ends up rescuing Red, who is the second daughter, and sheltering her against her mother’s wishes. So it’s a complex thing where everybody’s doing something that they shouldn’t. Kate is trying to keep everyone safe and Red is endangering people because of the law being after her. And then Molly gets involved. So Kate has to protect Red because Molly’s her daughter, and Molly would be an accessory. I set them up to have troubles. So those are the three women. And my goal with the novel was to show what found family is like. That our biological families may not be the family we find the most home in. And so how does a person find their tribe and their found family? And what do they do when their estranged sister becomes the person that they want the most to be with?
Alessandra Torre: I love that. And so you have two generations. So how old is Molly?
Mary Carroll Moore: It’s three generations. So Molly is in her early 20s. Red is in her late 20s. So they’re close.
Alessandra Torre: Oh. Oh, so she’s a young estranged sister.
Mary Carroll Moore: Yeah. And then Kate is in her late 30s. So Molly and Red are somewhat on the same page as far as music tastes and all of that. But Kate is completely in a different world.
Alessandra Torre: Yeah, I love that. So returning to our topic of putting yourself in your characters. When you created these characters who are all very different and I’m sure all very different from you as a person, talk us through that process and how you use your own history or personality or anything else when you’re creating those characters.
Mary Carroll Moore: Well, I’ve been working on this book for ten years, which is not a surprise since it’s so complicated. I had an earlier novel published with this family, so Kate and Molly were part of that novel, so I knew them a little bit. But one thing that intrigued me about Kate was that she was very cold and very distant. She’d been betrayed so many times. She really guarded herself. So in writing.
Alessandra Torre: Kate is the oldest one?
Mary Carroll Moore: The oldest one. Yeah. Thank you for keeping me straight here. So Kate is the search and rescue pilot, and she lives her life with meticulous details, evidence, and facts. And in Kate, I found a link to myself in that I love order, and I love planning, and I love knowing what’s going to happen. And she’s got that quality of me. She also has a protective quality, which I do, too. She wants to protect her family most of all. So those are the things that drew me to Kate and finding out more about her as I wrote this second book. The things that parallel my life with Red’s is that Red is a rebel and she does things on impulse, and I have that quality, too. So that’s that dichotomy of wanting things to be orderly and then at the same time saying, the heck with this and just breaking out. So Red and Kate are the opposites of my personality, those two qualities of control and lack of control, I guess you could call it.
Alessandra Torre: And those can blend well because they blend well in yourself.
Mary Carroll Moore: They do what they do.
Alessandra Torre: These two characters can find common ground, right?
Mary Carroll Moore: And they can and they do in the end. But when they first meet as with any polar opposites in a person, they clash. So in me, I have this part that wants to keep everything in line at the same time. As I say, let’s break out. So I got to embody those two qualities in two different people and then bring them together and see what happened. And they fight and they reject each other and they cry, and they do everything that would make you think they would never become compatible. But in the end, they are. And, they’re really falling in love with each other as sisters. So that’s what I integrated in myself at this point in my life that I’ve, I’ve fallen in love with these two parts of myself, but luckily I have fiction that I can explore to the nth degree.
Alessandra Torre: I love that. And as far as their careers and their jobs, what made you choose Search and Rescue? Was it because of the plot?
Mary Carroll Moore: No, it was actually my mom. My mom was a pilot, and when I was growing up, my friends would ask, well, what is your dad doing? And I’d say, my mom is a pilot which blew them away. But I really admired her. And she was always this mystery to me. She was a pilot in World War Two, and at 22, she became a commercially licensed pilot. And she joined the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, which was a non-military, group of about 1000 women that served to ferry planes and do training so that men could be freed up to go overseas. And I grew up with this legend in my life of my mom, who was a pilot and then stopped flying, and she would never talk about her flying years. She did a little bit when we pressed her and she had a scrapbook of pictures and, I think it was the Library of Congress who interviewed her at one point. So it was this really important part of her life that I was just dying to know more about. Why, at 22, did she decide to fly planes and then join the war effort? It was like, wow. So I wrote this book to understand her, and I took flying lessons when I was writing it to do my research to see what was it like actually being in the cockpit of a plane, how women … because it’s a very male-dominated industry, aviation. And how do women do it? Yeah. So I think Kate and Red’s pilot backgrounds came from my desire to know my mother better.
Alessandra Torre: I love that. Yeah. I think it’s a unique field to go into and one that you do have to have a certain level of gumption. It takes a unique person to say yeah, this is the career that I pick. We do have a question from YouTube. From one of our live viewers. Hi, Rob. He said, “Does putting yourself into your characters work better for pantsers or a plotter?”
Mary Carroll Moore: Oh, great question.
Alessandra Torre: One last question is, are you a pantser or a plotter?
Mary Carroll Moore: Yeah, I’m a little of both. So I plot in the very beginning. I brainstorm using a storyboard that’s similar to how filmmakers diagrams for movies. It’s a series of cartoon boxes that describe the different plot points. So I do a save-the-cat approach. And then I go crazy. I just go into writing and I pants it completely. At that point, I start to understand the motivation behind what I’m choosing, because the plotter part of me doesn’t kick in that intuition side, or the inner needingness to explore something in a book. I didn’t realize I was writing this because I wanted to understand my mom until probably a late revision stage. And then I went, oh my God, I am learning about women pilots, and it’s my mom. To answer your question, Rob, it’s definitely the pantser side for me, but it would be different for everybody.
Alessandra Torre: And I have to say, I think that whether you’re a pantser or a plotter. I speak from a pantser’s point of view. I am a pantser. And I write fiction. No matter which path you take, and I work with a lot of authors who are serious plotters, it’s so important that you know your characters before you start writing. Because it’s hard to know how they’re going to react to something. The way that they speak, how they dress, are they late to work in the morning? Are they 20 minutes early? So I feel that character development really should happen as early as possible. My first character, I just basically wrote myself.I just put myself, my personality into a character because that was the easiest for me. And, I used jobs that I was familiar with and I had a history with because that was the easiest for me. So I think for a lot of new authors, the more you can put into your characters, the better, and you can use different elements. So you don’t have a bunch of cookie-cutter characters that are all just clones of yourself, like Mary said Red is this side of you or this piece of you and maybe Molly has your love of cooking or something like that. We are all so multifaceted. So it’s easy for us to just take a facet.
Mary Carroll Moore: And this is the coolest part of fiction because you do show up as your characters. But. I fictionalize everything. So the history and the actual actions in the book are completely fictionalized. But the flavor, I’d say the flavor or the inner life of the character would definitely connect with something in me. Molly’s an artist, by the way, and I’m also a painter. When I’m not writing, I’m painting. Sometimes I get so stuck with my books, I have to do something else creative, and that’s what I do. But she’s a painter, and she’s gone to art school, and she’s back home because she’s had a very bad relationship experience. So that’s the way she meets the two other women. And she comes in with this…I’d say painters view life differently. The art eye sees certain textures and colors and shapes and blending of different energies. And she does that a lot. So that’s the part of me that I brought into Molly’s characters that is the observing people, but also observing the world from an art point of view, from an artist’s eye. So that’s really fun for me.
Alessandra Torre: I’d love to talk about putting yourself in characters that are not like you. For example, a male character or someone who is a villain or something else. And this next question might lend to that a little bit. It’s someone from Facebook, and they said, is the father a connecting element, or does the father have a role in this book?
Mary Carroll Moore: Very much so. So the father is the betrayer of the two women. He’s been absent all his life. He’s also a bigamist. He has another family that they find out about later in the book. It’s not a spoiler alert because it’s hinted at from the beginning, but the father when I wrote him. It’s an interesting thing. I wrote him as a bad guy completely wrong in everything he does and all the treatment that he’s given his daughters. And in the end, when I was revising, I realized he is a stereotype. Bad guys who are stereotypes are very much like cartoon characters. It’s terrible for the reader. They get so turned off by it. So I decided what quality would help me understand the humanness of this person who has betrayed his daughters. And that way the two daughters can come to some reconciliation about him by the end, something that they share. So I looked at the quality of longing, and I found that most humans have a longing inside, a secret longing sometimes. Sometimes it’s obvious. But when I looked at his quality of longing, his name’s John, John’s quality of longing, I realized that he’s got this desire for freedom. He wants to not be tied down. And so every time he starts to get tied down, he really wants the skies, you know, to take off in his plane or to create new relationships. And he also believes that there’s enough love to go around and he shouldn’t be limited. Now, I don’t agree with all of those things myself, but once I got this quality of longing in him, I was able to write him in a way that was believable and not as repugnant as when I started. So he stopped being a stereotype. But he does create a lot of questions for readers. How do the women actually get to the point where they’re okay with him? Or maybe they’re not okay, but they accept who he was and they use that as a bonding piece between them. Yeah.
Alessandra Torre: So this is really interesting when you walk us through the process. Thank you. A person joined us from Facebook for the question. “You said you really examined the quality of longing. So this is a concept I’m not familiar with. So. When you were trying to humanize this character, did you have a bank of qualities that you were looking at and you thought, oh, I’ll pick longing, or can you just walk us through this process?”
Mary Carroll Moore: Bad guys are hard to write. Today’s newsletter post on Substack is about writing bad guys in a good way because I think they’re very, very hard to write and people often go into stereotypes with them. So I was looking at what the opposites would be. In other words, if somebody is completely bad and they do these terrible things, what would be the opposite of that? And what I thought of with John is that he makes these harmful decisions, and he’s not conscious of the harm. So what would be the motivation behind that? What would be the opposite of these actions? And that I came up with longing because I thought, all humans have a longing. They long for something and it drives their actions. It drives Red to search for family despite the harm she’s going to be bringing to Kate. It drives Kate to decide to forgo evidence and help Red get free. It really does everything with those two women’s motivations. So longing for me was just the inner drive to reach something that they don’t have. And it can be secret. It can be something they’re not even conscious of, but it drives every action and motive. It’s their motivation. And so a lot of times when you look at the cause for a character’s decisions, I’d come back to longing. What are they longing for and why does this make them do what they do? So that’s basically how I discovered it as a writer. I’m sure other people have many ways to do this, and this just happens to be the one that worked for me, for the bad guys.
Alessandra Torre: I love that. Just on a side note, you mentioned, “oh, he takes to the skies.” So I’m assuming he shared his deepest passions with these two daughters and he trusted them, unlike lots of fathers. So he is also a pilot?
Mary Carroll Moore: Yes, he’s a pilot. He’s a stunt pilot. So he trained both Red and Kate. At first, when they met, that’s a huge jealousy between them. He was my father. He trained me to be a pilot. Well, he was my father, too. And I am a pilot. So nobody was special here. Yeah. John, the father, actually did trust the daughters and believed that the daughters could be more than just the traditional female role in their lives. So he gave them that freedom that he longed for himself. For him, it’s twisted. But for them, it became more of a pure freedom, I’d say.
Alessandra Torre: Yeah. That’s so interesting. You have such a great dichotomy of characters there. So. And I love just talking about writing great villains. I was looking at a case study on Silence of the Lambs, and it was saying you have such a repugnant killer in that. And if anyone watching hasn’t read the book, maybe you’ve seen the movie. But, the killer is this horrible person who is keeping a woman in a dark well right before he skins her. But he has this little dog that he loves. And who can’t connect with that, right? I mean, some people aren’t dog people, but for the most part, there’s a large group of people who can connect with deeply loving any animal. You still hate him. It’s not causing you to warm to him, but you can at least connect with him in that when his animal is in danger and he panics you can associate with that.
Mary Carroll Moore: So that’s a great example. Great example. And also Hannibal Lecter in there. He’s an incredibly terrible person. But he had this cultural side that he loves fine food and music and art and all that stuff. And I’m thinking, oh my God, this writer is brilliant to have given this really repugnant character these characteristics that were positive.
Alessandra Torre: It’s funny because I don’t even see him as the villain, even though he is the villain. But I don’t see him as the villain because I’m worried about this other guy. But he’s a gentleman in his interactions. We have another question from YouTube. Rob said, “When writing younger characters, do you use your experiences at that age, or do you imagine what it would be like aged now?”
Mary Carroll Moore: Really good question. So my first novel was YA. So Molly in that book was a 16-year-old. And I did have to go back to how I felt at 16, the awkwardness of teenage years and all of that. And she has a younger brother who is 5 or 6 in that book. And again, I’m trying to find a way to do believable children, which I don’t remember how I was at 5 or 6. So the way I work is to get feedback. I have an excellent writers’ group and writing partners. So if I can get positive feedback from them that this is believable for this age, then I’m gold. But if I can’t, then I have to rework. And I read a lot too. I read other authors who write young characters to see how they show the awkwardness of a young child. And, that’s a really great question, too.
Alessandra Torre: It is a great question. Another spin or potential slant is that if I was writing this would be a struggle because I’m not super old. I mean, it’s been decades since I was 16 years old, and I feel 16-year-olds now or 14-year-olds are so different than when I was 14. In some ways, they just have a completely different life and they have different viewpoints and they have different interests and things like that. So I almost think if I was going to write a young character and it was a main character, and I was really going to be heavily immersed in their life and their story, I almost think I would set it in the 90s because then it could be so much easier for me? And I would because I would have to educate myself in everything. That is unless I had a character that was part of a cult and locked away and in a completely different scenario. I’m just out of touch with today’s youth and what they face. But at the same time, I think we all have insecurities, bullying, or different things. It just comes in different vehicles now.
Mary Carroll Moore: I remember that I had that same question about the young narrator in the next book that’s coming out next year. She’s an Australian teenager, and she’s a troublemaker. She’s just gotten out of juvie. And in the story, she has to use social media. And I was trying to decide, what do I use? TikTok. Snapchat? What do the 16-year-olds from Australia use right now? And this happens now, I didn’t do mine in the 90s. That was a good idea. So I texted a friend whose daughter is that age and said would you please run this by your daughter and she can tell me what kids use right now. And that was really helpful. So I’m definitely into research. If I’m writing out of my personal realm…search and rescue or flying or young kids. I have to get it accurate by finding somebody who can help me or researching it.
Alessandra Torre: Yeah. And that’s tough because I was reading one of the books I wrote a decade ago, and I was referring to social media networks that aren’t even around anymore. So you can date your book pretty quickly. I read a book in high school and I read it recently again. And the lady said, “Oh, she just got a new $30,000 car.” And it was clear from the way she was saying that, that it was supposed to be a really nice, really expensive car, but it was like, man, this did not age well. So now when I write, I really try to avoid, things that in 10, 20, or 30 years, someone’s going to be, what? What is? But, so but I love that. We are out of time. If anyone has any final questions, you’ve got a minute. Shout it out. Or forever hold your piece. But we have some great comments on Facebook, so thank you for being here. If they’re interested in reading your books. Where can they find your newest release?
Mary Carroll Moore: MaryCarrollMoore.com, my website, or they’re on all online booksellers, Amazon, bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, Target, or anywhere you go.
Alessandra Torre: And what about your Substack?
Mary Carroll Moore: If you go to my website you’ll see the Substack sign-up. But it’s basically MaryCarrollMoore.substack.com, and I send out a weekly post every Friday that’s free. And it covers all kinds of topics like this. So the villain one just went out today. And you can still access it on the website and then sign up if you want to get them regularly.
Alessandra Torre: Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you to our audience, our live audience. And if you’re watching the replay, we have 69 other First Draft Friday episodes. So please feel free to binge away if you’re watching on YouTube. Please follow us on Facebook. Please join the group, and we’ll see you all in a couple of weeks at another First Draft Friday. Thank you so much, Mary, for joining us.
Mary Carroll Moore: Thank you so much, everyone.
Alessandra Torre: Bye bye.
