Ask the author...

[Anne Lucas]

I love the character Sarah, I want to know what inspired you to construct her courageous character? I mean, is she a work of total imagination or there’s some kind of feeling or relation that inspired you?

[Sola Gracia]

I think there are probably more than one main characters in the book. I want to ask you if that was intentional. And I am glad if you tell me your favorite author or someone who you consider as your model for your writing style. Thank you!

[T22H]

What inspired you to write this book and how did you select the characters to fit well in their respective roles?

[Charlie Sheldon]

I love the character Sarah, I want to know what inspired you to construct her courageous character? I mean, is she a work of total imagination or there’s some kind of feeling or relation that inspired you?

Her spirit and self is exactly what I imagine my wife was like at 13 or 14. Exactly, which I why I dedicated Totem to her. Also, originally I was thinking of a young boy coming of age in the wilderness and then thought, no, have this adventure be a girl. I knew some young girls when my sons were the same age and one or two of them really strugglred, ran away, lived on their own at that age, terrifying and dangerous and yet filled with grit and courage, and I'd guess there is a little of them, too, in Sarah....

[Charlie Sheldon]

I think there are probably more than one main characters in the book. I want to ask you if that was intentional. And I am glad if you tell me your favorite author or someone who you consider as your model for your writing style. Thank you!

It was very intentional. I like having several points of view, it makes the story wider, gives the reader more choices. For writing style I like Elmore Leonard, Annie Proulx, Joseph Conrad, John Dops Passos

[Charlie Sheldon]

What inspired you to write this book and how did you select the characters to fit well in their respective roles?

If you go back and look at the forums for Strong Heart and Adrift, or earlier answers here in this Totem forum, there is much about the source of these tales and how they came to be. I am note sure how characters are "selected" as they sort of appear as the story unfolds. Here is one way - when I had the first half of Totem edited, the Kill Sites book 1, a 70,000 word book came back at 50,000 words, so i=now it was too short really to be a stand alone book. To add words just to puff it up would ruin it. So what I did, was, I added an entire new plot line, Carl and his niece, and then was able to interleave that with the previous story, and I think it worked well, made the story a lot better, and dealt with some stuff I wanted to handle and hadn't in the first draft. So in that case I added some characters to build a new plot line. I am lucky in that several point of view style along a consistent time line makes it reasonably easy to add a new element.

[Muna Chizzy]

What was your inspiration when writing this Intriguing story?

[Charlie Sheldon]

What was your inspiration when writing this Intriguing story?

I think if you read through the ask the author string you'll see a lot of the inspiration made clear. I wanted to explore this old legend that First Peoples had always been here, write something celebrating the Olympic wilderness, delve into some sea stories, and explore how the telling of stories made us human.

[Tamara Abdellatif]

Do you imagine the characters in real life?
And their reactions to normal day to day stuff?
Or are they not in your mind till you mean to write about them?

[Charlie Sheldon]

Do you imagine the characters in real life?
And their reactions to normal day to day stuff?
Or are they not in your mind till you mean to write about them?

The first couple of novels I wrote, I struggled to "see" or "bring characters to life" and until one or two became "real" to me writing was an effort, an exercise in faith, but eventually, once a couple characters emerged and took on a life of their own, then the story became much easier because the characters began to do things and I was just describing what happened. This latest series, the last three books, the last 11 years, began with nearly three years of research, hours andn hours of study about human origins, development, consciousness, genetics, myth, legend, ice ages, geology, plants, climate changes. I knew eventually I wanted to write something set in Olympic National Park about a kid finding his or her strength somehow, but other than that spent no time on characters, at all. Then when I started writing Strong Heart, which began in 2013 when I got back from my first long gig at sea and decided if I was serious about bundling all this research into something, I better take a writing course, which I did, an University of Washington, a night time course for adults, once a week, taught by Lynn Coffin, a poet and novelist who should be much more famous than she is. The very first night, first class, before we even said our names, she had us write for ten minutes, and the piece I wrote is almost word for word the first three pages of the first book in the series Strong Heart. The characters were just there, waiting to be described, that's the best way to describe it. Of course I would ponder them and consider, and see their backstories, but I think basically all that research and filling my brain with information created a stew within which the characters became real. And that's the way it's been ever since, for each character, they just sort of "appear", I mean I will decide, let's say for Totem, I thought, I need a character who is somehow tied to the political state, government, politics, because a mining enterprise in a national park is surely political, and thus emerged Wentworth Randall.
I mentioned this earlier in response to another qiuestion, but the other thing I came to understand back with the start of this series is that each main character, to be interesting to the reader, needs to have his or her own dilemma or challenge, separate from the general story line, some personal crisis of issue that they are wrestling with, and this is especially true for a story structure like I use which has several points of view and plot lines all generally following a linear time line (ie no flashbacks except for the trips in dreams of visions the characters take, or in the case of Henry David Olsen's journal from his dream-time years ago). I think I just start telling the story, you see each character as you would in real life, a stranger just before you, and with time you grow to know him or her, you don't see pages and pages of backstory and description before the action begins, and I think this works more realistically, and is better for the flow of the story, though some readers seem to prefer a structure that leads off with a long long long introduction, and those readers do not like my tales very much. My sense here is that a reader has no use for a character who is merely in the story to move the story along, or tell the events without any personal engagement, readers see through that right away and you lose them. Instead the hope is that to the reader each character's arc is important and this will be what keeps them engaged - so for example I have Jarred who is an overweight doughy teenage boy who screws up at the beginning and makes a big mistake with his knife and vows not to do that again, and is afraid he is secretly weak, and doesn't think much of himself compared to his lean athletic friend Conner. This is designed in hopes the reader becomes engaged with the arc of each point of view telling the story, so while they are following the overall story they are enjoying the character's own personal struggle, whatever it may be, and if successful then the reader is engaged not with one main character telling a tale but with a whole group of people living within an entire world.....

[Chinecherem A]

How did you make your research to get enough information to write the book in the setting in which you wrote it. How did you familiarize yourself with the norms and reality?

[Charlie Sheldon]

How did you make your research to get enough information to write the book in the setting in which you wrote it. How did you familiarize yourself with the norms and reality?

Just a lotta time, I guess, plus where I was working when I began research, Bellingham Washington, there was this fantastic used bookstore that had for some reason shelves and shelves of books about science, theories, human origins, so I spent a lot of money there to buy even more books. I also of course read papers from the web when I could get them, plus ordered materials when I could. This time, 2010-2012 was before YouTube was really big, so I didn't have the huge number of videos you can watch now (though half the stuff is totally wrong these days). As far as talking about the Park or the seagoing stuff, that was all based on my personal expewience hiking and sailing.

[Sarai Burgos]

How long did the whole process of searching and gathering information to write this book take you? Due to the level of detail that we can appreciate in it, it is perceived that you were extremely immersed in the subject.

[Charlie Sheldon]

How long did the whole process of searching and gathering information to write this book take you? Due to the level of detail that we can appreciate in it, it is perceived that you were extremely immersed in the subject.

Started thinking about the general subject in the early 1990s, then embarked on a specific program of study in 2010, which I did for 2010, 2011, and halfway through 2012. Been keeping up with the general categories ever since.

[Sarai Burgos]

Which character do you most identify with?