One of the things I love best about writing novels is that I get to go inside various characters’ heads. I get to see what might go on in someone’s brain, and that helps me understand people a little better. It’s fun but also challenging looking at things from various perspectives. I have to try to understand the culture from which the characters come and understand what made them the way they are. Kinda like being an amateur psychologist.
In my Outsiders Mystery series, I go into the heads of characters in their 20’s and characters in their 70’s. Surprisingly, my most popular characters are the seventy-something-year-old grandmothers. I did the same with my mystery novel, The Handyman.
In my historical mystery, Breadcrumbs and Bombs, I got into the heads of characters in their 20’s (Lucas and his wife, Tawny) and into the heads of a twelve-year-old girl (Christa) and a teenage girl (Ilse), both of them German and trying to survive during WWII. That was a huge challenge. I had to figure out what they would sound like, what hopes and fears they would have, and how they would react to the events of the story. I was also in the heads of Christa’s German mother and a young Czech soldier, Petr.
The sequel to that book, which I’m currently working on, is Bloodlines and Barbed Wire. It will have a varied cast, as well, including children, and an elderly woman suffering from dementia. That elderly woman is also a hoarder. I’m having lots of fun with her character.
In my Bavarian Woods time travel series, I started out in the heads of a sixty-something-year-old German woman, a forty-year-old American man, and then a thirty-year-old German woman. In the second book, I also delved into a ten-year-old German boy’s head. Then, in the third book, Not Expecting This, I am in the heads of a seventeen-year-old pregnant American girl, a nineteen-year-old American/German male, a thirty-eight-year-old English woman, and a forty-eight-year-old American man. Wow, talk about challenging.
Some authors prefer writing the entire book in one character’s point-of-view and that’s great. I read lots of books like that, but for some reason that I can’t explain, I love creating multiple points-of-view. I guess I want to see how different people are, from the inside out. I hope this makes sense.