Author helps others pick up the craft

When it comes to creating characters, local author Mark Love believes that a name can say it all.

Using the example of “Pirates of the Caribbean” lead protagonist, Captain Jack Sparrow, Love described how each word evokes a certain idea to the attentive viewers: “Captain” naturally evokes images of a leader, “Jack” of playful trickster and “Sparrow” of a fierce, world-worn traveler. Combine these three traits, and you get the perfect name to describe a pirate roaming the high seas.

“You can have a lot of fun with the names of your characters, and your readers are paying attention, it’s kind of an inside track,” Love said. “They can figure out some of these things that are going back and forth.”

Love was the special guest speaker at Thursday’s meeting of the Dowagiac Rotary club, held at the Elks Lodge that afternoon. The author and human resources team leader with the Cass County COA described his current project of helping his neighbors master the art of the written word with his series of workshops held at the council’s locations in Dowagiac and Cassopolis.

Before coming to the COA, Love worked in journalism, writing for publications on Michigan’s east coast, such as the Oakland Press.

However, he’s dedicated much of time and energy to fiction, publishing six books and a number of short stories. His most popular books are those in his Jamie Richmond series of mystery novels, which include titles such as “Devious” and “Vanishing Act.”

“I’ve been writing fiction for a longtime, it’s one of my passions,” Love said. “Mysteries are something that’s called upon me from the very beginning.”

This passion is what he’s now sharing with the 30 students who are currently attending his workshops, giving them advice on how to creative compelling characters and plotlines. One key piece of advice he gave his students is to draw from their own experiences when creating characters, to incorporate memorable traits of people in real life to their fictional creations.

One exercise that he found effective with attendees was to give them three pages of an existing short story before cutting the rest off and having them come up with a conclusion on their own. The results were, as to be expected, wildly divergent between each student.

“It’s great to see them coming back not only with story ideas we came up with as a group but with their own stories,” Love said.