Generations of Characters ...

 

Hi, Kit Morgan here and for today's blog I had to really think about what to write. With as much writing as I do, one would think I could come up with something! Then it occurred to me, wow, I DO do a lot of writing, don't I? After creating 128 books, I can say that. But when you have that many books, something happens. You have characters that are getting older, they have children, then grandchildren, and readers want more!

This is what happens when you've created a family or group of people that readers fall in love with. They know these characters almost as well as I do. They've seen them fall in love, get married, have babies. They've watched those babies grow up into young adults and eventually reach marriageable age. (I write a lot of historical westerns) and then they want to see what happens to them.

But what happens when the characters you started out with get old? I mean, really old? I have one character whose been around since the beginning of my writing adventure. Grandma Waller from Clear Creek. She's 100 years old now in her current timeline (and brags about it too) has appeared in multiple series, and is still kicking. Readers would be devastated if something happened to her. Thankfully I found a solution to keeping Grandma around, but not every author can do what I did. You can find out how in The Tales of Tom Turner: Clear Creek. And it's not just Grandma that's getting up there. I have all the original settlers of my fictional town of Clear Creek with lots of candles on their birthday cakes too.

Anyway, I'm going to be delving into a third generation of characters soon. If not this year, then the next. But what does that tell us about characters like these? Well, it's simple. We love them. They're family to we as authors and you as readers. I'm not the only author working with different generations of characters in their stories. Many of the authors belonging to Sweet Americana Sweethearts have two, three, even four generations of characters they work with. Those are some big family trees! And, of course, some of those characters pass on, and some are only spoken of in passing in a new series. Maybe said series takes place twenty years after the last time the character appeared. Still, we all get attached, but the beauty of it is, we wouldn't get that way unless the story is good and the characters too! 

So here's to the life of our favorite characters in all those wonderful books we love to read. May they live on in books and in our minds and for some, even in film and television! Dealing with generations of characters is one of the advantages of writing historical fiction, and one of the reasons I love writing it! 

Until next time,

Kit

AMAZON