What’s your inspiration?

I love going to book signings like I did today, and I often get asked which book is my favorite (hard to answer that one) or where I come up with characters.

That one’s easier to answer.

Here’s a secret: I don’t come up with them; I put them down on paper or a screen.

And I know my characters well because they are all me.

As to the first part, I very rarely feel like I have to construct a character out of paperclips and smoke. Most of the time they are dictating themselves to me. I’m just the scribe. So I don’t have to come up with anything. I simply must type or scribble as fast as I can to keep up with them, because they already are incorporeal in my head. They just need to show up on the page.

As to the second part, I can’t help but write what I’ve experienced or what I imagine someone else would experience. But I know those feelings and those ideas so intimately, because I lived them.

Every character, even the ones of mine you hate, are me. I explore and enlarge a facet of my personality with a larger, story purpose in mind, so the character’s internal thoughts and emotions and actions are all me.

If I had to pick a character who is the closest to me—although he isn’t autobiographical exactly—it would be Jake in All the Waters of the Earth. His personality is very much mine, and his life story is closer to mine than almost any other. Yes, my closest character is male. Shrugs.

Of course like me compared to Jake, I don’t physically resemble my characters in the slightest. To come up with inspiration for their looks, I usually just see what is around me. I live in Southern California and have friends from all walks of life. I really enjoy taking the short drive to Los Angeles to explore the different neighborhoods like Koreatown or other ethnic neighborhoods, let alone just going to a museum and people-watching. My children’s school is 90-plus percent Hispanic, and I lived in Spain and speak Spanish, so a lot of my characters tend to be Spanish-speaking, just because I know the language well. So I try to match the person with a deeper theme of the story, which ends up making them physically reasonably diverse—even though deep inside they are all me.