Who Are These People?

I was having an interesting email exchange with a blogging friend about how much our own experiences inform our fiction and we touched on the subject of memoir. Coincidentally, I’m reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, also a memoir. Just a few minutes ago, I was checking in on Kristen Nelson’s blog, Pub Rants and memoirs were the subject of posts for three days running.

The subject got me thinking about how much of ourselves and the people we know creeps into our fiction. Writing my manuscript has been an iterative process. About eighteen months ago, a hypothetical situation occurred to me. The incident was something that could potentially happen to any business traveler and that person would have to choose one of two actions – both with devastating repercussions. Having never previously attempted a novel, I started to build the story. At the beginning, the main character was modeled almost entirely after me by default. I didn’t intend to make her me, but because I was juggling all the challenges of plotting, pacing, structure, etc. it was easiest to start with someone I completely understand. Some of the characters I developed aren’t based on anyone I know at all. Others are based almost entirely on real people. Not coincidentally, the characters with the most dialogue are the ones based on people I know. I suppose it makes writing dialogue for them easier because I can hear what they’d say and how they’d say it. Through ongoing revision, I’ve continued to make changes and evolve most of the characters a good distance away from their real world inspirations. I’ve moved them to new locations, changed their back stories, added and subtracted spouses and children, reinvented how they know the main character and taken them further into the realm of fiction. But although my main character is involved with people who aren’t real and is doing things I’ve never done, it’s taking me much longer to separate her from me and give her a completely unique persona.

When it comes to place, I’ve stuck with locales I know a lot about. At one time, a large part of the story took place in a city I’ve spent time in, but am not intimately familiar with and I recently cut that entire section and began rewriting it. It seemed too overwhelming to introduce one more unknown into the equation. Familiar people and places are easier to deal with while I’m being challenged with so many other issues.

I’m self-diagnosing my ongoing experience as a natural tendency of the beginning novelist and I anticipate that as I develop more skill, it will be easier to create characters completely out of thin air and to take the time to research other locations to represent them genuinely. I suspect that as I continue writing and revising, the story will come more into its own and the characters will mature into independent beings, their genesis unrecognizable to anyone but me.

Many well known authors write characters who are thinly veiled versions of themselves. John Updike and Philip Roth come immediately to mind. Quite a few writers admit to basing certain characters on people they’ve been close to in their lives.

The origin of fictional characters has me fascinated and I am hoping to hear from those of you who write. How much of your main character is you? How far away from you can you really get with your main character? Does your ability to create leading characters who are not like you at all develop over time? Where does the inspiration for your characters come from? Are they based on people you know? Are they a conglomeration of more than one person? Do you invent them in their entirety? How has this process changed for you if you've written more than one novel?

I'm hoping, as always to learn a lot from you.

Breakthrough on a White Board

It’s astounding to me how often it’s simple, unexpected things that can help solve what appears to be a complicated problem. I was surprised and touched by the comments and suggestions I received in response to my last post about my writing dilemma and want to thank those of you who commented. I am very happy to say that all the insight helped me. In addition to the great advice I received, I found a practical tool to help me work through the plotting and organizational problems I was having.

As ridiculous as it sounds, a white board and dry erase markers broke the spell. I wanted to run through the major plot elements I’d originally established and review them in order to first, make sure that I had worked out a story worth telling and find a way to fix it if I hadn’t. I then wanted to figure out what the primary theme underlying it all was so that I could look at the characters I’d originally created, the settings in which I’d placed them and the details I’d included (or not) that would reinforce the theme. The next step would be to make sure every sentence I’d drafted so far served to either reveal something about a character or was advancing the action.

I was having a terrible time doing this on paper or on my computer, but when I started working it out on the white board, dry eraser in hand, I was able to quickly lay out the big pieces, rearrange them, remove some and add still others in a very loose way. The ability to quickly add and erase made everything so much more fluid as I worked through this. Perhaps it’s because I’m a bit of a perfectionist, but I had a much harder time doing this on paper or PC. Apparently, once I’ve written something using either of these tools, it is harder for me to see the big picture and harder for me to make immediate changes. Maybe my desire to fix typos and spelling or write things down neatly takes me out of the creative flow. Once I’d gotten a good start on the white board, the ideas were flying and I was able to start sketching it all out in a notebook in a more detailed, useful way.

With this simple change to the way I was working through my problems, I was able to make my storyline more interesting (I hope) and raise the stakes by adding more conflict and confrontation for my main character. I came up with a number of symbols and colors to represent my x versus y theme. I created new characters to support the additional pieces of the story I’d added and came up with character names that subtly support the theme. There will be many more changes to come, but I am finally anxious to go back to what I have and start rearranging, cutting and adding with the fresh insight into the characters, settings and other pieces of the story that I’ve gained. Now when I work on a scene that takes place in a room, I can consciously make decisions about the feel of the room, the weather outside, the furniture and the colors or even if it should be indoors at all. I can reexamine the physical appearance and dress of each character to determine whether or not they are supporting the story in the way they should. I’d previously done some of this instinctively to start out with, but I can now make much more significant improvement and progress.

I wish I could say I had a dream that gave me all the insight I needed, or something mystical happened that gave me a breakthrough, but it was just a simple change of medium.

Therese Fowler has answered 20 Questions on her process with today's post on her blog, Making it Up. As I suspected, Therese is very disciplined and efficient in her approach -- check it out. Have you had a breakthrough moment, due to something seemingly unrelated to the problem? Do you begin a story and keep on typing, letting the structure fall naturally into place? What other methods do you use to take the premise of a story through to plotting and creating characters? Do you write lengthy character sketches, knowing that very little of what you write about them will go into your novel? There is obviously no one right way to do this and I’m finding that each writer is nearly unique in his or her approach. I’ve heard that many writers have rituals and routines to put them into the zone. What methods and techniques work for you?

Forgiveness and Redemption

When I was in the eighth grade, there was a boy in our class who loved to do pen and ink drawings of battle scenes. He was smaller than the other boys, got good grades and kept to himself. I was new to the school that year, but I think it was a painful year for almost everyone in my class. There were two girls and two boys that the rest of us were all afraid of because it was only a matter of time before everyone was the target of their mockery. Most days it wasn’t too bad because we all shared the wealth pretty equally when it came to being teased. When it was your turn in the ring, if even for a few minutes, it was excruciating.

We were in art class one afternoon and the number of the boy who loved to draw, was up. Someone walked behind him and swiped a brush loaded with blue watercolor paint across the collar of his button down shirt. Someone else did the same. Another pulled the drawing from beneath his hands and tore it to pieces. He looked down at the detailed rendering, now destroyed and I heard him say, very quietly, that took me two weeks. By the time class was over, everyone had put paint on him or done something. I had done something.

We had a history class after art was over and as the humiliated boy climbed the worn wooden stairs to the third floor, I heard him say to himself, this was a brand new shirt. I imagined he had to go home and explain to his parents what happened to the shirt and I thought they would be angry and want to call the school. He, of course would have to beg them not to because it would only make things worse.

It’s been over 30 years since that day and I can still remember that boy’s name and his delicate features. I remember the white shirt with the blue pattern and his corduroy Levis. His 13 year old image comes into my mind every once in a while and I feel new shame at what I did. In my mind, I've told him how sorry I am a thousand times and I've hoped that by some miracle, he'd hear my thoughts. I wonder if he remembers what happened and if he’s angry when he thinks of it.

We inflict and receive a lot of pain over a lifetime. When we’re young, all the hurt is magnified and we remember every thoughtless, cruel thing that happens. If we’re lucky, the feelings fade over time and we realize it wasn’t so bad. Sometimes it is bad and if we can, we forgive the perpetrator. Sometimes we can’t forgive and we can never release the pain.

There are things that were said to me as a child or a teenager that I took great offense at and felt angry about for years. In a child’s mind, adults should be infallible and never make mistakes. My stepson, a wonderful young man of 26 has reminded me of things he now finds funny that were said in the heat of emotion when he was an adolescent. I am so grateful for his easy going nature because in the retelling, I recognize they were exactly the kind of heated words that I would have burned into memory and held a grudge over for years. I feel sorry for ever being mad at comments made by people who were just doing the best they could.

We’re all doing the best we can. It’s my mantra when things become emotional and people act irrationally. I’ve forgotten or forgiven all the real and perceived wrongs done to me. But I’ve collected memories over decades of things I wish I could take back. I don’t know how many people there are in the world who don’t forgive me.

I have a story idea that I like a lot, but I may have an insurmountable problem. My main character is flawed. She’s fundamentally a good person, but I'd have her make some pretty big mistakes. I love this character because she's fallible and I want her to have the chance to eventually get it right. Real people, interesting and likeable people, make mistakes and they hurt people and hopefully, they eventually find themselves and do the right thing. I've tried to think of books with flawed female characters and all that comes to mind is Madame Bovary and The House of Mirth -- look what happened to those two ladies!

When you read a story, can you forgive a flawed character her mistakes and allow her to seek redemption, or must she always come to a tragic end? Maybe we're more forgiving with real people than the ones we want to read about. I’d love to hear what you think.