Where Does the Story Finds the Writer?

 

Where do your stories/characters come from?

Few questions elicit so much rage, (or fear) in writers. No, the story fairies don’t leave that complex protagonist, dynamic antagonist, and/or mind-bending plot for us under our Wonder Woman pillow cases. Yes, my Missus does pick out the bedding. 

Firstly, I don't know myself where the ideas really come from, what makes them come, or whether one day they'll stop. Neil Gaiman

Most writers simply notice things other people don’t—even in other writers' stories. A creative-writing professor once told the class about going through another writer’s research for a story of a gun handed down generation to generation. The prof could see his own character, obsessed with constructing the perfect gun...with which to murder his wife. While I don’t think he ever published that story, I’m fairly certain he was divorced within a year of telling us about it.

"Forget your personal tragedy...you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously." -Ernest Hemingway

For all the bravado and "advice" to channel your pain into the story while sparing the reader of your personal bagage, Hemingway was notoriously autobiographical via the intimate relationships depicted in his fiction. Like the author himself, Robert Jordan (For Whom the Bell Tolls) greived the shame of a father who committed suicide. Like the author, Jordan feared disgrace. But mostly, Jordan, (like Hemingway) feared inferiority to strong women, women who indured more than he could ever imagine. 

So, you get all the “daring do” in his writing. Though hardly the first, (really, read Dashiell Hammett or Jack London) Hemingway spurred a generation of wish-fulfillment writers attempting to live through their characters. If' you've seen read/seen interviews with Robert B. Parker, you know exactly where Spenser came from. Same with Walter Mosley and his alter-ego, Easy Rollins.

"Poverty is the mother of crime," –Marcus Aurelius

Delia Owens grew up in rural Georgia. I promise you that the ignorance and poverty she saw there informed the characters and conflict in her first novel, Where the Crawdads Sing. The late-great Donald Westlake, a near-life-long denizen of NYC’s seedier pool halls neighborhoods knew men like his hoods, Parker and Dortmunder. David Cornwell, (aka John le Carré) based his spymaster, George Smiley on a series of mentors. The iffy fashion sense, (Smiley is described as dressing like a bookie) was inspired by Le Carré’s con-man father. A lot is environment.

...when fighting monsters…

Many writers “find” inspiration in the very things that haunt them. Thomas Harris makes no secret that Hannibal Lecter is largely inspired by Robert Stroud. The fabled Birdman of Alcatraz, Stroud wrote scholarly journal articles chronicling avian behavior and documented avian diseases previously unknown. Stroud also wrote violent rape porn and was considered a pscyhopath because, (to steal from Harris) they had no other term for what he was. However, if you read Harris closely, (particularly, the Red Dragon) you can’t help but wonder about abuse in the author’s childhood. 

Writing can be a blatant confessional or a subtle disclosure. When Tom Ripley opines, “I’d rather be a fake somebody, than a real nobody,” you hear Patricia Highsmith SHRIEKING for an identity beyond society’s pejorative labels. It can also be a personal song of pain and sorrow. The nightmarish violence in Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister the Serial Killer is simply a reflection on the soul-crushing violence that women face all over the world.  

In short, don’t shy away from those colorful, loud, and/or obnoxious friends, family members, and/or mild acquaintances. The drunk who couldn't hold a menial-labor job but could pencil-solve for X with two variables. Your babysitter who smoked/drank at 16 and read Highsmith to you in east-Texas hell? Your uncle, court marshalled three times before he was finally pensioned out? They are all the life, breath, and blood of your characters. So then are your base impulses. Those horrible ones you'd never admit to—those belong to your work, too.

Sometimes the only difference between the good guys and the bad guys is dental insurance and depictions in fiction.

My stories are predicated on the question: who’s good, who’s bad, and who decides? My obsession began when I was nine-years-old and watched two cops beat my stepdad into an all-liquid diet and steal several-hundred dollars out of his pocket. 

Now, make no mistake, there was nothing honest about that money or my stepdad. The cops knew that. He knew they were going to keep the money the moment they pulled him over for a traffic violation. Sure, the old man got mouthy but mostly they gave him a beat-down because he was a three-time loser yet still refused to kiss their...authority. 

With a childhood rooted in television, I grew up in hero-worship of police. Seeing they are just people really changed my outlook on police and society and the morality plays in most fiction.

All my stories spring from incidents from my childhood. But all my conflicts spring from that injustice, that night. All my protags and antags are based on men and women from my neighborhood who faced similar conflicts and injustices. 

Your story? You have it. You probably know it, it’s why you started this rough-hewn road to begin with. If you don’t know it, you might fiddle around with prompts, dance around with ideas but that's just practice. You got what you need rolling around in your subconscious. You have a life and experiences and questions, (maybe answers, too) that just don’t sit right. In short, you have something to say.

I promise your take on any topic is at once old-friend familiar and other-worldly new to the reader. 

The photo above, movie poster for "Where the Crawdad's Sing" belongs to Sony Pictures. It is used here for instructional and educational purposes, covered under the Fair Use Act.