More Choices
Characters have always been easy for me to create. I find the process a bit like shopping with a giant catalog of demographic facts, stories, and traumas and then playing mix and match with these things until you have interesting people.
Character creation has always been my favorite part of role playing games. I even have my own truncated version a character sheet, I sometime use when creating book characters. Link. Again the act of writing is often really fun.
For this book, I started with my male lead. I flipped through the catalog of life and decided he was from California –the part of California that is as far away from the glitz of Hollywood as possible. I did some math to figure out he was born in 1954. That way he could serve in Vietnam or not depending on who he turned out to be. And then I made his birthday July 25, my father’s birthday. I doubted the date would come up in the book (it doesn’t), but it made me happy to know. It made me like this guy more.
The only other thing I knew about this man was he came into the Stillwater Café at a set time every week and he had a dead wife. That’s not much, but it’s not nothing either. What kind of man would keep a strict routine? What kind of man would be a slave to routine? A man like me. I love it when things stay the same, but I am not as good as Flint (the eventual name of my hero) at keeping the world from intruding on my routine.
In this way I decided Flint was a little OCD, a little troubled, and a little lonely. I also decided that he would be working on journal therapy. This was something I had heard about and after much research decided would be perfect for my story. So know my hero needed a problem. An interesting problem. A not whiney problem. And most importantly a problem I could pull off. Thus Flint became a man worried about good and evil in the world. His problem is he feels like the bad guys are winning.
I don’t have much faith. I wish I did, but there are too many dead parents in my back story for that. If I do have faith it is in Dr. King’s statement, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” I believe that to be true. I can offer you some evidence in support of that statement. But I can offer you far too many counterfactuals as well. This is my struggle.
My hero’s struggle would be very similar.
Not all writing is autobiographical, but a lot of it is.
So this unlocked a lot of questions for me. It unlocked time. I would set this story in the run up to the 2016 Presidential election –I wrote this book in 2018 before I knew the results of the 2020 election, or the 2024 election for that matter.
It unlocked more of my hero’s pathology. He would be suffering from intermittent panic attacks but not doing well in traditional therapy, hence the turn to journal therapy. His trauma wouldn’t be rooted in the war exactly, that story has been told by people with more experience than me. But it would be rooted in things he saw in the war.
So what did he see in the war?
Again my voracious appetite for news provided the answer. This time it came from the New York Times Book review. It was a book by Rachel Moran titled Paid For, which I immediately checked out from the library and read. The thesis of this book is that prostitution should be kept illegal, very, very illegal. This came as surprise to me. Having done zero research on the matter prior to starting this book and just being a guy living in the world, I was under the impression that the position of Carol Leigh was the correct, progressive position.
Ms. Leigh was an advocate for decriminalizing prostitution so society could regulate and protect sex workers. Ms. Moran’s point is legalizing prostitution codifies a man’s right to buy a woman’s body. I don’t know if that’s true, but it is a damn interesting point.
Now my hero was beginning to take real shape. He was a man who dedicated his life to stopping sex trafficking, and upon his retirement he found he hadn’t made a dent.
Next I returned to the catalog of life and made a picture of this guy. He’s modeled after a Highschool Principal I saw speak on an completely unrelated issue. I don’t remember that guys name, but he had a presence about him that was cool.
My guy would be tall and strong. Unbowed by sixty plus years of life. Military hair. Pale eyes. He wears the grey suits that Archer wears in season seven of that show. And he always has on a big watch. Military guys always seem to have big watches.
Then I needed a name. I like names to be indicative of character, which can be super cheesy. So you have to be careful. Names are often the hardest part for me. But…. I knew my guy was a hard man. I know a guy named Steele. He is not a hard man and that’s a tough burden for him to carry. I didn’t think my guy’s parents would so aspirational. Eventually I decided on Flint. Because Treasure Island was my favorite book as a kid.
Flint of course is a last name. So that’s means my Flint would have to have a first name so awful he wouldn’t let anyone know what it is. My college roommate was named Shannon. He hated having a name that was transitioning from a male name to a female name. Tampax sent him a free sample when he turned thirteen and I stole that story to give to Flint. Another childhood favorite of mine is Police Academy. And the chubby nerd in police academy is a dude named Leslie. Leslie Barbara.
So I had my male lead. In broad strokes anyway. Now I need to give him a foil. Someone who would be his equal but still need him.
For more on that process, tune in next week. Or if you’re not following along in real time, click the link at the bottom of the page.
As Garrison Keilor always says, “Be well. Do good work. And keep in touch.”
Until next time,
cw
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