I went to the Toronto Old Book and Paper Show a couple of weeks ago planning to buy nothing. Instead, I wanted to pick up business cards from merchants who might be interested in the old maps, magazines and other ephemera filling boxes and shelves and attic space in our house. I’m still trying to make some headway on my endless house purge—what a friend reminded me the other day is called the Swedish Death Purge. My father’s side of the family is Swedish. It must be genetic. 

Right inside the door at the Wychwood Barns was a tabletop box filled with black-and-white photos ripped from family albums. Other peoples’ purge projects. I couldn’t help picking up an old photograph of a little girl in a smock dress holding a big book in front of a Christmas tree. Is that a photo album in her hands? Maybe the picture tells a circular story. The girl is holding the album in which someone will soon tack the photo they’re taking, probably using those old white corners. It will stay there for 70 years before it’s ripped out and the album is discarded, the photo itself floating toward a cardboard box in Wychwood Barns.

Written on the back: “Xmas 1954. Zetta 3 ½ years. Just received her bible and has a very treasured and meaningful expression.”

“How much for the picture?” I asked the guy behind the table.

“That looks like a two-dollar photo,” he said.

I fished in my pocket. “I’ve got a buck in change.”

“Sold,” he said.

The girl made me think of the main character in my new novel, Far Creek Road, who would have been about 3½  in 1954. Wandering the Barns, looking at other ephemera, I also thought about the way writers construct characters. The tricks of the trade. Some novelists seek out old photographs like this one, or the period ads like the ones inside plastic sleeves that I leafed through at another table. “Light up a Kent… you’ve got a good thing going.” They use them while drafting their books to get a feel for the characters and their worlds, especially if they’re writing historical fiction. Writers can tape cuttings to their walls or pin them to a bulletin board, creating Look Books. “Things go better with Coke,” another ad says, with two women in pink bathrobes drinking Coke from straws under pink beehive hair dryers. 

I once met a novelist with a more idiosyncratic approach. She bought old clothes in Value Village to create costumes for her main characters, putting together outfits she figured they would wear. Back in her study, she wore each outfit as she wrote a character’s most important scenes, switching to another outfit when she wanted to introduce a different character’s point of view. She told me she had a big mirror near her desk and liked to watch herself as she wrote.

I offer these as possible approaches for new writers—and tidbits for readers—although I don’t do either of these things, and bought the photograph post facto. Far Creek Road was published a month ago on the anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which threatens as the story reaches its climax. But maybe a couple of the things I’ve learned could be helpful as well. There’s no one right way to write, and one of the jobs of an emerging writer is to try different techniques on for size and see what works for them.

My main character’s name is Mary Alice (Tink) Parker. Her older sister nicknamed her Tink because she’s tiny, like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan. Tink narrates the book once she’s grown and looking back on a pivotal year in her childhood. When she’s young, she lives in a suburb like North Vancouver, where I grew up. Her neighbours are adults like the ones I knew as a child, many of them either housewives or veterans of the Second World War. 

Tink is a few years older than I was during the missile crisis and much different than I was as a child. I remember being quiet, clumsy and intense, my nose always in a book. Tink, on the other hand, is funny, observant, pugnacious and perplexed by the adults around her. She eavesdrops on neighbourhood gossip and unwittingly spies on affairs, blurting out secrets as she tries to make sense of what’s going on. The parents of her best friend Norman are schoolteachers with leftist beliefs, and Norman’s father is prone to wander. When the missile crisis threatens, his parents face a witch hunt while Norman becomes a target of bullies. Tink tries to defend him, and her small world shatters.

When I create my protagonists, I start by making them physically different than me, the way I did with Tink. Sometimes they’re men, and right there they have a different way of moving through the world. But most of my protagonists are women, and since I’m tall and Swedish-y and spent many years playing hockey, I often make them smaller and maybe wiry, but not as physically strong.

When I’m writing a scene, that means I can’t default to my own reactions. Instead, I have to ask myself if my character would feel more vulnerable than I would in the same situation, or feel exasperated by being seen as vulnerable. Would bullies pick on her when they wouldn’t pick on me? Bullies being cowards, although dangerous ones. If you read the description of women killed by mass murders like Paul Bernardo, they’re often described as petite. On the other hand, so are dancers, and they’re formidable. And maybe someone more winning than I was could talk their way out of the type of situations that left me perplexed.

All of which is to say that instead of using photographs or clothes to create characters, I start to build them up by asking myself how my small (or heavy or male) characters would act in a given situation as opposed to the way I would. What would Tink do when she couldn’t break through the line of linked arms while playing Red Rover, something I could always do as a much larger child? Tink is well-loved in her neighbourhood, but while writing a Red Rover scene, I realized she felt condescended to by the local children, who treated her as a pet. That’s when she began to come into focus.

The first third of a novel always takes me far longer to write than the final two-thirds. Yet after months of hit-and-miss writing, I reach a point where the characters are both different and separate from me. I know I’m there when they start doing things I don’t anticipate and change the action I’d planned to write. The manuscript comes alive, and that’s such a relief. It’s hard to explain the shift, but maybe it’s like the moment when someone you don’t know very well says something unexpected that illuminates their personality. Maybe a woman you privately think of as bubbly and fragile and shallow says she got addicted last year to furniture flipping videos on TikTok, and now she flips old furniture on weekends to pay off her student loan and keep old dressers out of landfill. You think: Okay, so so there you are. You remember that everyone in the world is different, and you can never predict in what ways.

So I paid a buck for the photo of Zetta, aged 3½, and it’s on my desk looking at me as I write. I saw Tink as having the same high forehead and button nose, and I feel fond of both Zetta and Tink as I look at the picture. 

Yet here’s something else for writers. Readers need to be able to see the characters the way they want, and it’s best not to itemize each feature in your protagonist’s face but draw a sketch that they can fill in. The high forehead and button nose are my version of Tink. Each reader will have a different mental picture, and they’re just as correct as mine, or yours, or your cousin’s, and that’s just fine.

By the way, here’s an excerpt from one of the first reviews of Far Creek Road by Valerie Adolph in the Historical Novel Society of England:

“The character of Tink is especially well-drawn as she observes much and understands little. Her blurted out inaccuracies are humorous but revealing of the secrets and insincerities of the adults she observes. Her awkward questioning provides a light-hearted counterpoint to painful but universal themes.

“This engrossing book sets the simplicity of friendship between two children against a framework of international politics. The author delves deeply into Tink’s world–that of a child largely unaware of world events, but condemned to experience their effects as her neighbors descend from civilized politeness to witch hunt.”

Far Creek Road is available at Amazon, Indigo, or at your local indie through my publisher, ECW Press.