Characters

Characters matter. More than genre, more than style... characters matter. If my characters are intriguing, three-dimensional, living, then my book will be interesting. Gandalf the Gray is an interesting character: He could write a cookbook and it will still be readable.
I was doing an Author's Q&A for the release of Frostbite and someone asked where I get my characters from and whether I based them off of actual people I knew. I struggled with that question, because I knew it was a very important one... and the answer was not a clean cut yes or no.
My thought process started down this road not too long ago, when I told someone they were one of the ten most interesting people I had ever met. That got me thinking about who exactly were the ten most interesting people I had ever met. As I made the list, I realized that there were snippets and pieces of them that became part of my characters.
No fictional character is an exact copy of any of these people. For one, I couldn't do them justice. They are far too intriguing for me to capture in ink and paper. Two, I tend to do bad things to characters and if I thought of the character as I do the person I might not be able to properly torture them in the way that you, loving reader, have come to expect.
I'm going to spend some time over the course of this blog talking about the people who have provided DNA to characters, how they've impacted me, and what I learned from them. They were intriguing to me when I knew them and I think you'll find them interesting too.
The first one of note, in no particular order, is Dr. Neuenschwander. He was a tall, skinny pole of a man with a mop of long white hair on top. My first introduction to him was when I visited the university he was teaching at. I had done well on a national test of high school physics and the dean was interested in making sure that Dr. N and I met.
I'm not sure what image a physics genius conjures in most minds. Dr. N did not match mine. He road a motorcycle, loved jazz music and the saxophone, had an interest in old cars, and a smile and a laugh that let you know when he was genuinely tickled by something.
That is not to say he was not a physics genius. He impressed upon me, more than anything else, that the key to mastery of science is a mastery of mathematics. I was something of a math prodigy, or so I thought till I sat through his Atomic and Nuclear Physics lecture. Dr. N was a virtuoso, a master of mathematics from advanced calculus to trigonometry. He could process massive equations on the fly with a practiced ease that we mere undergraduates could not. I've praised him on his math skill many times since: it's always met with an "Aw, shucks" humility as if he was nothing particularly special. I am not alone in my impression of him as a genius: he served as the president of the American Physics Association.
It was through Dr. N that I was introduced to both the writings of Richard Feynman and Dr. N's favorite book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Both have shaped me greatly and I'm sure there are moments that I subconsciously plagiarize both of them.
Dr. N taught me that I was not the smartest man on planet Earth. He was the first person I ever met who I was absolutely certain was smarter than me. This is a valuable lesson for a fantasy writer, because our characters often encounter things which are beyond them, beyond comprehension. I am not sure I could have appreciated the emotions behind that had I never sat through his lectures.