Good morning, and welcome to day #2 of my week at Behind the Scenes.

I said yesterday that we begin with setting, but that goes hand in hand with discovering who our characters are. On our travels here in the Dakotas, we’re fleshing out a contemporary school teacher whose ancestors homesteaded the tall grass prairies just after the railroad came through in 1879 and met with tragedy in the long winter made so famous by the writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Our heroine comes from spunky, determined stock, and all her resources will be called upon as she wrestles with the choices she must face to claim her future.

Kate Noble, heroine of The Diary, has a similar tenacious streak, although we weren’t so aware of that when we first “met” her. We knew she’d poured her all into raising her younger half sister after a tragic accident took their mother and her sister’s father, but we didn’t know she’d honed tunnel vision to an art form. She forms her character judgments early on and almost never wavers.

In both instances, our characterization process is similar. The two halves of Adriana brainstorm together, not just about occupations and locations and character traits, but about the specific history behind who the characters are. Much of this detail never gets onto the page, but because we’ve come to know them so intimately, we can turn them loose to battle the obstacles we throw at them and live out their story, trusting that they will stay in character and not let us down. Sometimes the tiniest twists that had no significance when we first fleshed out their histories turn out to be the thread upon which the ending inevitably hangs. For me, that’s part of what keeps the writing process fresh and inviting.

Adriana Kraft