More that Unites Us

 

You’ll be in trouble if you get caught.

And not the usual kind of trouble that you can apologise for, pay a penance, and seek forgiveness.

Oh no, it’s bigger than that.

You can take a chance, of course, that you will never be caught.

If you hide it well enough, if you disguise it cleverly enough, there’s a good chance that the truth will never be revealed.

Yes, and there goes another pig at thirty thousand feet.

See it?

No, my point exactly.

The problem is, stories and their characters must be completely and utterly believable.

And whether we are aware of it or not, we draw everything from the world around us, then use that wealth of knowledge and experience to create, in our own unique way, the world of our fiction.

And its characters.

Are we conscious of the traits that we choose for them?  Sometimes.  Deliberate choice of certain character idiosyncrasies can help to populate our fictional worlds with a broader range of people, and expand the stories that can be told.

What about the rest?  How much do we depend on our own abilities to build a character from the complexities of our own subconscious?  That’s trickier to answer, and I can only speak for myself but I rely on that quite a great deal.

I sometimes feel like a massive sponge

No, not yellow and full of holes.

Honestly.

It’s like everyone and everything around me gets drawn in, soaked up, and kept for when it is really needed.  Then just give it a good squeeze to release a conglomeration of experiences and people into one, unique individual.

A character ready to be chucked in at the deep end.

Thing is though, no matter how individual we think our characters are, they all bear some relation to the people around us.

Those with the strongest influence will get drawn in the deepest, and get pushed out the most during the creation process.

Makes sense.

Problem is, how do you hide it?

How do you prevent the person you have drawn on from recognising themselves in the world you have created?

I’m not entirely sure that you can.

Or rather, I’m not sure that you can stop someone else from recognising the person you have drawn on.

How many of us would recognise ourselves in a fictional context?

How many of us are that self-aware?

And if they catch you, oh boy are you in trouble.

Claiming the writing is fictional works only if the characters are not recognisable as real people.

And if you work with the people you have drawn from, oh boy, oh boy.

You will have to see them every day and withstand the torture of their presence while they denounce your work and at the same time demand a share of the profit.

There is another way.

You can deliberately make them a part of your work.

And they can help.

I’ve tried it with my most recent book and it came about purely by chance.

During the editing process of the previous book, I was incredibly grateful for the help of one particular reader, and offered her the usual rewards.

Wine, a meal out, night with a male escort.

Kidding.

A meal out on my salary?

Anyway, she said she didn’t want any of those things.

What she really wanted, more than anything else, was to be a character in the next book.

I was surprised.

I offered more wine.

She said no, she wanted to be a character.

Fine, I said, good guy or bad guy?

Bad guy, of course.  I want to be a killer hooker.

At which point I quite naturally had a good laugh, and so did she.

But it was what she wanted, it wasn’t going to cost me anything, and opened up the next book to a whole new storyline I might never have considered.

Turned out that the character sketch she wrote was rather similar to one I had already been working on, and I combined the two.

Now I’m sure you’re thinking that she made all sorts of demands with regard to her character, on how she wanted to look mostly, but surprisingly she didn’t.

The only thing she wanted her character to have, was revenge on the one person who had hurt her the most.  The father who had abandoned her.

I understood.

Of the many people who had hurt me in my own life, there weren’t many on whom I wanted revenge, but my own father had done the same as hers, and it naturally struck a chord.

It would seem we are not so individual after all.

In the wealth and realms of human experience, there are only so many hurts that can be pushed upon us.

Our unique experiences are in fact shared one.

Rather than dividing us, there are more that unite us.