Sometimes the Magic Works by Terry Brooks

you don’t want to tackle a story in which the lead character is a doctor trying to cure cancer and where a consideration of various current advances in medicine is central to the plot if you don’t know anything about doctors or cancer or medicine and don’t want to research all three extensively. You want to write about aspects of the human condition that you are comfortable exploring or inhabiting over the course of your book.
    If I want to make Maud and Feral former CIA operatives, I had better have a talk with my editor about what this is like and do some reading by some of those former spooks. It wouldn’t hurt for me to do a little reading about people with disabilities, either.
    This brings us to rule number two: YOUR CHARACTERS MUST BEHAVE IN A BELIEVABLE FASHION .
    This rule is an important addendum to the first. If you don’t know what you are writing about to begin with, it becomes difficult for you to know how to describe your characters. How do CIA operatives behave? How do they think? What makes them different from, say, policemen? Or are they? Even if you don’t have life experience in this field, you have to find out, if you are going to make your protagonist believable.
    It is important to understand that this doesn’t mean that Maud can’t do some things that are entirely out of character with what you discover to be true about CIA operatives or about her personally. But it does mean that what she does at any given point has to feel right in the context of the storytelling. She might well do something totally out of character, like offer help to a bird she finds lying injured by the side of the road, even though she hates birds. But I have to give the reader a reason to believe that she might behave in this way under the circumstances.
    The meshing of your characters and your plot should feel seamless to the reader. It isn’t inappropriate to let the reader wonder about how a character behaves at any given point, if somewhere down the road an explanation is offered or implied that brings everything back into line. What doesn’t work is when a character acts in an offhanded, arbitrary way and no reason is ever given for this. Or worse, if a character behaves in a fashion that suggests the writer is attempting to solve a troublesome plot device with an easy out: the dreaded deus ex machina. Irrational or inconsistent behavior merely detracts from the effort at creating a wholly realized, believable character.
    So in our development of Maud and Finch, we need to see them interact and react in ways that make sense to us in terms of what we know to be true about the larger world and the human condition.
    The third rule is an easy one: A PROTAGONIST MUST BE CHALLENGED BY A CONFLICT THAT REQUIRES RESOLUTION .
    That’s easy enough here, where Maud is facing a life-threatening confrontation with an old enemy. The entire book centers on their efforts to outsmart each other, and we know going in that one of them, or maybe even both, will fail. Conflict is necessary in every book because that’s what generates concern for and interest in our characters. But we especially need it in this story because without it, we don’t have much of a thriller.
    Fair enough. We’ve got our conflict. But in order to lend some depth to this story, maybe we want to expand Maud’s problems beyond her impending confrontation with her nemesis. Maybe Maud has lost the steely determination that once served her so well as a CIA operative. Maybe her life is different enough that, like the sheriff in
High Noon
, she doesn’t want to have to face another showdown. So now we have an opportunity to watch her wrestle with her fears and doubts, even as she awaits the inevitable appearance of Feral Finch. Maybe she is afraid for her cats or one of her friends or neighbors and must carry the burden of their safety on her aging shoulders, as well. Maybe she has just discovered she is going