Viola, Woodrow, Rosie & Sylvester: Character Arc Throughout a Series

With the arrival this summer of my new middle grade series, The Mysterious Four, I've been thinking a whole lot about Character. I've never written a series of novels before (actually these books are more like interweaving story collections than anything else), and I noticed a marked difference in the process from my earlier books, especially when it came to creating the characters.

The Mysterious Four are Viola Hart, Sylvester Cho, Woodrow Knox, and Rosie Smithers, a group of sixth graders who live on the same block in Moon Hollow, an odd little Hudson Valley town (because, really, aren't all Hudson Valley towns a little odd?). After they meet and become friends, the new girl, Viola, binds them together with her love of mystery stories. They form a club and decide to become detectives on their own.


I had a basic idea of who these kids were when I began - even as I wrote the proposal for the first book. It's hard to start a story without a sense of how the protagonists respond to any given stimulus.



The Basics: Viola, that new girl, is outgoing and a bit bossy. Sylvester is a goofball with a penchant for parlor tricks. Woodrow likes sports and games, and he rides his bike everywhere. And Rosie is a science girl, loves reading about animals, and collecting specimens to decorate her room with, to the dismay of her older sister with whom she shares the space.

These very simple traits lead my kids to explore events in their town that interest them most.



For example: Viola listens to her parents' police radio to find out true crimes that occur in Moon Hollow. Sylvester pays attention to the customers at his parents' diner and uses his knowledge of magic tricks to try to debunk some potentially threatening patrons. Woodrow solves some rather benign puzzles during gym class; as a result, he challenges himself to discover some truly weird phenomena in town. And Rosie helps a far-away cousin who is having some extremely strange pet problems.







I never expected the mysteries to be easily solved by my readers--some of the stories may be, and some of them may take an internet search to figure out. And I think that's fine. I think kids who pick up this book want to be surprised - to learn things they've never heard of before. I thought about what excited me when I was a kid - animals with strange traits, puzzles that seemed to have no answer, secret codes, secret passages. My readers have access to all sorts of information, but it might take them some effort to find it. And good for them. The reader can experience being an actual detective.



This is the difference between this series and similar ones that came before it, like the wonderful Encyclopedia Brown books by Donald J. Sobol. Readers nowadays have technology that folks back in the Sobol days didn't have. The fact that Encyclopedia Brown had a photographic memory and knew everything about Everthing certainly helped keep those books interesting and the Sobol's clues varied. Encylopedia's memory was a unique and ground-breaking trait for its time. The kid may have been one of the first superpowered children's book heroes.



Which brings me back to Character . . . My group of kids are NOT geniuses, so I needed to find another way to make the concept of their mystery club success plausible. I tried to do this with their quirks, their unique interests, their temperment, their curiosity.



Even with a book that is simply a group of mystery stories that are linked together like The Mysterious Four, I felt the need to make Viola's, Rosie's, Woodrow's, and Sylvester's relationship grow, become stronger. And this is the difference I discovered in writing a series, rather than the stand alone books I'd written previously--I was able to continue the Four's character transformations into books two and three. I knew I'd have room there to let them grow, change, challenge one another, and surprise themselves. So Book #1 may be pretty straight forward -- but I was happy to find that there was much more to the story.



This was my favorite part of getting to the end of #3: realizing how far the kids had come . . . and yet, how much they had stayed the same. Isn't this the way life is? The ordinary mysteries of our everyday experience shape us, change us, help us see the world in a new way, and if we're lucky, after the dust settles, we ultimately hold on to who we are at our center. Our center is what allowed us to be curious, to explore, to fight in the first place.



I hope I was this generous and capable with my favorite new detectives. And I hope my readers will want to explore Moon Hollow with the Four as they journey into new (and sometimes scary) corners of town. Because, come on, who doesn't like a little mystery?

The Death of a Fake Person

Anyone who knows me, knows that recently, I've become a huge fan of all things Joss Whedon. This either makes me a big loser for pooh-poohing Buffy and Angel for so long (because how could these shows possibly live up to the hype? oh, the naivete of moi...), a big loser for finally becoming a fan-boy, or a big loser because all I do now is sit on the couch and watch 5 consecutive hours of TV on DVD every single g'darn night. I'm okay with my self-inflicted loser-status... I'd proudly wear a big plastic "LOSER" button on my lapel every time I leave my apartment if it came down to choosing between wearing such a button and falling into an alternate dimension where Joss Whedon never existed, which, in the world of Whedon, is always a possibility.

I love his creativity. I love his silliness. I love his shocking twists of plot. But above all, I love his characters. Even the totally EVIL ones... His team of talented writers somehow make you relate to EVERYONE on some level -- which creates an unsettling dynamic between wanting the heroes to defeat the villains, yet wanting the villains to find some sort of redemption... I guess?

However, when I started out watching these shows, nobody warned me the cost which would eventually come with my emotional investment in the lives of these fictional characters. And I've since learned that Mr. Joss is infamous for murdering some of his most Beloved in the most shocking ways imaginable. (Okay, granted, some of the characters "magically" return, but you never know which ones will, and which ones will not.) The fact that I've teared-up over the supposed death of a quirky demon says something about the transcendent qualities possible in these "lowly" genre categories of pop-culture. But it's all good.

Except when my favorite character from the Whedon-verse is killed in a shock-twist final moment of the episode I watched last night. Don't worry - I won't give anything away for those of you who have not yet had the priviledge of being subjected to this torture...

I went to bed, my face tear-stained, my nose stuffed up, thinking "WHY? WHY? WHYYYYY?"

There was so much LEFT I wanted to see happen, to go-through with these people... I had expectations DAMMIT, and now they've all been dashed (no, exploded) to hell!

I woke up this morning, the episode replaying in my sleep-addled brain, like a post-traumatic stress disorder flashback... And as I made myself coffee, the brilliance of the episode began to work itself into my nervous system... And I recognized carefully crafted early clues that indicated I should have seen this coming -- I should have been prepared...

But I guess that's what makes my Whedon so compelling. I'm never prepared. I'm always shocked into laughter, or fear, or revulsion... and I think that's what makes good story-telling.

So even though I'm pissed, and hoping, improbably, that maybe this plot-point will be one of those "ha, ha, just kidding" moments, I understand that these things are what make us "losers" keep watching. At least until the networks cancel the shows prematurely. I, like many Joss fans, am keeping my fingers crossed for his next project: Dollhouse.

Hopefully, we, the faithful, will have the opportunity to love the next generation of Whedon creations before he, or someone else, decides to pull the plug on them. Despite the pain, I will always return for more... Like the vampires who populate his worlds, I'm totally addicted...