Sometimes 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, Heminway's protagonist, Robert Jordan (For Whom the Bell Tolls) greived the shame of a father who committed suicide. Also like the author, Jordan feared disgrace. But mostly, Jordan feared inferiority to strong women, women who indured more than he could ever imagine. 

Probably not an actual quote from Dr. Freud

So, think of all the “daring do” in his writing as well-packaged emotional baggage. Though hardly the first, (really, read Dashiell Hammett or Jack London) Hemingway spurred a generation of wish-fulfillment writers attempting to live beyond their issues, 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. Smiley's cuckolding wife, is a script-flip, for Le Carré’s legendary philandery. 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 creepy colorful, loud, and/or obnoxious friends, family members, and/or mild acquaintances. The more "colorful" the better—checkered pasts make for BIG shadows.

Why, what have you heard?

Like the drunk who can't hold a menial-labor job but can pencil-solve for X with two variables. What about your babysitter who smoked/drank at 16 and read Highsmith to you in east-Texas hell? Or 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-thousand dollars out of his pocket. 

Now, make no mistake, there was nothing honest about that money—or my stepdad. The cops knew that. My old man knew they were going to keep his 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 with more than their month's pay in his pockets. 

With a childhood rooted in television, I grew up in hero-worship of police. Seeing that the cops are just people really changed my outlook. Especially on police and society and the morality plays in most fiction. John Sanford plays extrodinarily well in the moral gray fields that most cops and crooks inhabit. His detective, Lucas Davenport is more crook than cop.

Not all of my stories spring from incidents from my childhood. Most of it is just made up. 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. 

I own none of the photos above. All is used here for instructional and educational purposes, covered under the Fair Use Act.