Imagining Characters

Okay, I was reading and making changes to the third draft of my crime novel, Dark Water, last week, and I got tired, so I took a break.

I was thinking of the characters, putting imaginary faces to them and trying to not associate any of them with real people. This is fictional, after all.

Even though some of the characters were loosely based on real people, I tried to picture them differently so that I could honestly say that they are truly made up. The main detectives in the story, Mickey Calloway and Erin Hayes, weren't based on anyone at all. There were no real-life people or characters from other fictional writers that I drew from in imagining them.

As I've written in other posts, I've used AI to generate Calloway and Hayes, based on descriptions I had written in my novel. And while my AI tools created a perfect DS Hayes, I still think my Inspector Calloway needs work.

Anyway, last week, while I was taking a break from my rewrite of the story (I've chopped a lot and added some new stuff, which I'll talk about more for this week's Friday Fiction post), I thought I would us Perplexity to flesh out some more characters.

The first person that I got the AI tool to create was the murder victim, Emily Fraser. She's an investigative reporter who covers Ottawa municipal affairs. As I've already shared in the synopsis, Fraser is found in the Rideau River only days after she and her fiancé, Ottawa City Councillor Daniel Whitmore, failed to board an Air Canada flight that crashed shortly after taking off.

Initially, when I was trying to picture a strong, confident reporter, I thought of Rachel Gilmore, but I didn't feel comfortable having her likeness as a murder victim (I mean, really, I don't like picturing anybody as a victim of a violent crime). I wrote Fraser as a pretty woman with long red hair and gave more description to Perplexity, not mentioning Gilmore at all.

Here's who it gave me on the first try. (Actually, this is the second try, as you'll see.)

Emily Fraser

She was perfect. In the original image, the AI tool tried to place the CBC logo on the building of the background but it was awful. It was also yellow instead of red, so I asked it to remove the logo but keep Fraser exactly the same.

Next on my list was Fraser's fiancé, Daniel Whitmore. There were a couple of tweaks I had to make, like removing a beard (I didn't mention one in my description but Perplexity felt the need to add one), and not making him platinum blond.

I like the third image and that's the one I've kept.

Daniel Whitmore

Next, I was thinking of the police superintendent of the Serious Crimes Unit, Conner Watkins. I've never mentioned him in previous blog posts but it stands to reason that Calloway and Hayes have a boss.

This one was tricky: the AI tool generated some pretty goofy looking bosses, even though I said that Watkins was serious and by-the-book, but also cared about his team of detectives. I had it think of a coach of a sports team, but images made him almost comical.

It wasn't until I removed the reference to a coach that it got closer to my idea of what Watkins looks like. And I also had to get rid of the idea of him wearing a uniform because the AI image always made the uniform look more military or would have some pretty awful spellings of Ottawa and Police.

In plain clothes, the tool came to a very good rendering of Superintendent Conner Watkins.

Conner Watkins

One person who is a supporting character that has already made an appearance in the sequel, The Watcher, is Chief Pathologist Dr. Leslie Abbot. She is a no-nonsense person that is also willing to let her personality come through and show that she's human, too.

AI had trouble with her age, which is actually rather fitting. When I first introduce her, she appears "older than Calloway by a few years, maybe by as many as ten. Though, because of her line of work, seeing so much death, natural or otherwise, she could have been younger by as many years, her career aging her more quickly."

Here's the image I settled on:

Leslie Abbot

In sharing the next couple of characters, I have to be careful. I don't want to reveal anything or cause any future readers to draw conclusions. There are some people who appear throughout the story and are driving characters, and here they are.

Jason School is the Ottawa Councillor for Riverside South Ward. Perplexity got his description bang-on: he looks more like a school teacher than a representative for the people in his ward, though he's well-respected.

Jason School

He sits on the Committee for Infrastructure Development and is working with Whitmore, who is the councillor for Barrhaven East and sits on the transit committee, on overseeing the expansion of Ottawa's light-rail system from Riverside South to Barrhaven, where residents of these two wards would have easy access to transportation to the Ottawa airport.

When Whitmore goes missing after the death of Fraser, police turn to School in the hopes that he knows where Whitmore is.

Councillor School also is a supporter of Rick Byers, owner of the construction company that is building the transit stations for the expanded LRT line. Both he and School were being investigated by Fraser before her death.

I gave Perplexity a description of Byers that I wrote in the book. It had some issues and cited that it was creating a character that represented a real person, so I asked it to make Byers fictional, and it finally gave me what I was asking for.

Rick Byers

That's all I want to say about these characters. You'll have to read the story to learn more about them.

But my distraction from writing gave me good ideas of the main characters in Dark Water. What do you think?

Happy Wednesday!