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important goals and want desperately to achieve them. But it’s a zero-sum game. If the hero or heroine wins, the villain must lose.
    Creating character profiles
     
    Write down everything you can think of about your characters. Your hero or heroine, your villain, and your other central characters deserve fully developed biographies. Include family histories, birthplaces, schooling, marriages, personal triumphs and tragedies. Think of what your characters like to read and eat and the music they enjoy. What are their politics and their opinions on current issues? How do they like to spend their leisure time? What do they worry about? What do they believe in?
    Visualize them. How old are they? What do they look like? What kinds of clothes do they wear?
    Imagine their surroundings, too. Draw a word sketch of their house or apartment and their office. Is it neat or cluttered? What paintings hang on the walls? What magazines are on the coffee table?
    All of this creative work is background, the writer’s necessary homework. You must know your characters fully before you write about them. But be prepared to leave much of this biographical material out of your story.
    After creating a dramatic opening scene in which a corpse is discovered and your sleuth appears, you might be tempted to interrupt your story to tell your readers all about your hero:
    He peered into the mirror, scraping his razor carefully around the raised red scar that ran from the corner of his mouth to his jaw, and he remembered that fateful night in New Orleans when Millie O’Leary, the blonde in the black velvet dress, with the glass eye…
     
    And if you’re not careful, you’ll allow your character to remember all of the delightful material from that biography you worked so hard to create. From the night in New Orleans, you’ll recount your hero’s childhood, and how the playground bully always stole his lunch money, and how his father said that if he ever wanted to be a man he’d have to learn to stand up to bullies and defend himself. His mother hated violence, and Mom and Dad had big arguments about it. Your hero knew that it was his fault that his parents fought all the time, so he secretly joined a gym and met an ex-prizefighter, who…
    And so on and on and on. By now your readers have completely lost track of your story and are likely to set your book aside.
    Don’t allow the biographies you’ve composed to limit your imagination and creativity. If, once your story is underway, you find that your characters begin saying and doing unexpected things, don’t resist them. Characters often do “come alive” in the story as they never do in sketches and biographies.
    Characterization through scenes
     
    In real life, the more we listen to people talk and watch them act, the more we know about them. The same is true in fiction.
    Mystery readers prefer to learn about fictional characters the way they get to know real people: by watching them and listening to them.
    Everything characters say or do is a clue to their personalities, their life histories, and the forces that motivate them. As they act and speak in scenes, your characters will gradually acquire depth and complexity. Good writers reveal what their characters are like by showing them in action.
    In a mystery story, of course, things are never what they appear to be. For example, suppose your readers first meet a character named Harry when he enters a tavern. He straddles a stool, nods to the bartender, and says, “Gimme a Bud.”
    A moment later Mr. Rowan appears. He slides onto the adjacent barstool, adjusts the crease in his pants, and says, “Excuse me, bartender, but what do you have by way of German beers?”
    In this simple scene readers will find clues to the education, experience, taste, appearance, and attitudes of two characters. Readers will expect conflict between these two, and as the scene develops they will learn more about them.
    As you show Harry and Mr. Rowan