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How I Create Characters for My Stories
Like many writers, my characters are built up from an amalgam of people I have known at different points in my life. For example, one of the key characters in Counting on Trust is a woman named Eleanor Locke. She was based, in part on my mother. My mother was a single head of household with three children to support during the Great Depression. I deeply admired her strength, compassion and resilience in the face of adversity. With respect to those traits, I used her as a model for Eleanor, though her background and career trajectory are very different. One of the main mischief makers in the story – a Chinese general – was based on individuals I met when my husband and I took a trip to China as part of an academic exchange program in the 1980s.
When I’m creating characters, I like to mix and match physical traits, personality, temperament, and behavioral quirks. Often I will exaggerate these to provide more depth and interest for my readers. Then I like to give each character a backstory that provides a rationale for their behavior. Lastly, I decide how they would probably interact with each other within the context of the story, and make adjustments as the writing progresses.
I like to think of it as being a chef: you might have a recipe of sorts, but the real fun and creativity comes with experimenting and tweaking until you get something that feels right. Counting on Trust has a large cast of characters and it allowed me to spend a lot of time indulging this passion!
In this suspense-charged, touching novel, Counting on Trust, information is stolen from a U.S. genetic engineering company (Omniprotein) by an employee promised payment by a Chinese general who wants to profit from selling the company’s technologies in the military region of China he commands.
• To force quick payment the thief attacks fellow employees and threatens to continue until his money arrives. Will his next targets be: young lovers, computer geek Gabriel and gorgeous biologist Selena, who are discovering loving sex while trying to overcome post-traumatic effects of Selena’s girlhood rape.
• Company president, Eleanor, who’s determined to keep some privacy and intimacy although her job’s high profile and her husband, Charley, has just had prostate cancer surgery.
• Venture capitalist, John, who plans to duplicate Omniprotein’s facility in China and reunite with his ex-wife, fashion designer Ziyi, who returned to Shanghai after their only child died.
The personal stories of these couples explore how privacy, intimacy and trust are changing in our social-media age. They paint a compelling portrait of our time.
Listen to an excerpt
About the Author: 
Themes of novels by M. Ferguson Powers reflect the author’s varied interests, including preservation of the natural world and its creatures;
Challenges of building and maintaining loving relationships in a culture with decreasing respect for personal boundaries and privacy
Influences of globalization on world events and how the U. S. and other nations relate to one another
Public policy issues such as controlling the military-industrial-political complex and requiring the health care industry to be more respectful of its clients
The need for cooperation across governments, cultures, and societies to address global challenges such as climate change
Developments in business and university administration and management
Powers has taught microbiology, headed a university office of research, served as executive director of two university-business partnership programs, and co-authored two books on university administration. She has a bachelor of science degree in bacteriology from The Pennsylvania State University, a master’s in experimental psychology from George Mason University, and a doctorate in educational leadership from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul.
She lives on an island near Seattle with husband David R. Powers and their two shelties. Her first novel, Each Unique and Fascinating, about a bullied young girl whose father has gone to war, was published in 2012. OrcaSpeak, a novel of relationships and suspense, was published in 2013, and its prequel, Counting on Trust, was published in 2017.
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