Arnav Gupta, over at his Bookworm blog, has started a thread on characters and their development. He picked Hercule Poirot to start it out. That got me thinking about my characters.
I had someone draw my two protagonists a while back. The drawings came out okay, but missed the mark. Probably my poor description of them that I sent the artist. That, or maybe the artist didn’t really read it. Or maybe really understand baseball. Still, good art as Neil Gaiman would say, just not exactly what I had in mind.
Picture Robert Redford playing Roy Hobbs in The Natural – baseball uniform and all (btw, The Natural is Will’s favorite movie, and he’s a huge baseball fan):
Now give him a Korean dad. Yul Kwon would be a good exemplar. After all, he’s smart and won Survivor.
Add a blonde American mom. Let’s pick Kelly Wentworth, also of Survivor fame, and because she’s from Ephrata, just up the road from where I live now in Moses Lake.
Twist genetics just a bit and you end up with a 16-year-old version of K-Pop star, Bi Rain, in his red hair phase. Now make his hair nearly orange, and you have Will Kwan.
Will’s a very smart guy with a sad backstory (It’s in the book. Go buy several copies. Then write glowing reviews on Amazon and Goodreads). He’s dealing with some issues and how he deals with them can get him into trouble. He also gets lost in thought – so lost that he stops walking and becomes an obstacle to those nearby. Will has also been known to stop eating, mid-chew, while he thinks about something. He’d rather think his way through a situation than fight.