These Characters are a Work of Fiction . . . Aren't They?

You are not a character in my book.  Trust me. 

We’re getting to the point where a few people have read the teaser, or maybe a few pages, and are making connections between reality and fiction.  Is Fred Dale?  Is so and so Mack Tucker?  Who is this?  What about this character?  Did this chapter really happen to you? 

I'm sort of used to this, from my short stories.  I have come to the conclusion that it is not uncommon for readers who know the author to reflexively search for connections to reality.  And while I can confidently insist that "you" are not a character, I can also say that on a cellular level, you may indeed  be part of the book because you are part of my experiences.  

A writer has a well they can dip into that is extremely valuable and helps make the best fiction—the well of experience.  The rest is completely made-up, but even the “made up” pieces are filtered through the writer’s reality.  I think the best fiction comes when the steadying details of reality and experience are completely married to fictional enhancements.   Sometimes this is done first-hand, sometimes it's done through an amazing amount of research (see Palahniuk, Chuck, a notorious researcher).  An example is my story, “Detail.”

I have cleaned cars since I was a teenager.  It was a decent buck and I enjoyed the process of turning something chaotic into something neat and clean.  Over the years, I have read articles, written articles, used thousands of products.  Would I ever write a story about a car detailer?  It’s pretty boring cleaning things up all day.  But I mixed this real well of knowledge with the made-up hook, the “strange attractor” that makes it a story instead of nonfiction—a car detailer cleans up the vehicles of people who have done bad things inside of them.  The story grew from there, new fictional things popping up after each draft.  But in the reviews, one compliment I continued to get was that the story works is because the car detailer knows how to clean the cars—there are tips and products that draw the reader in.  It creates an authenticity that helps the fictional parts work. 

When creating a character, a vehicle, a room, a town . . . it’s like cooking.  I have ingredients in my head.  For “Detail,” I had just completed the cleaning of a friend’s car—so it was fresh in my mind, and easy to use as part of the setting.  Maybe I saw a weird guy in a strange town, and used that description on a character.  Perhaps you said something to me many years ago that I thought was interesting, and it stuck in my notebook all this time, and becomes a piece of a character’s sensibilities.  A dash of this, a sprinkle of that . . . fiction is nothing but a Frankenstein creation built from the pieces of “real” inside of a writer.  The funny part is, even the most out of the world stuff comes from that “real.”

 

In The Samaritan, Dale Sampson can regenerate his organs and limbs.  How could reality be the basis for me describing this?  Because I know about surgeries from doing the research.  I've been on the operating table a time or two.  I know about healing from doing it myself.   I read a lot.  Interviewed a little.  I often sit and ask myself, “How would this person react to such and such?”  Sure, it’s fiction on the page, but it’s arrived at through my own meditations.

When I wanted to create a small town, I took the small town I lived in and then used the powers of make believe to make it smaller.  In reality, it's a nice, kind, warm town.  But I made it a little darker.  Seedier.  When I think of a playground, what do I think of?  Yes, that playground.  But then my imagination can move the pieces around.  It can build a new basketball court.  Inhabit it with different people.  Hell, I can drop a meteor on it if I wanted to.  

Characters are the same way.  Mack Tucker is an insane confluence of every single crazy friend I’ve ever had.  And trust me when I say, I’ve had some crazy ones.  But Mack doesn’t exist. He’s not my best friend from high school, or one of my goofy college friends.  He’s Mack Tucker, and he has the flaws and sensibilities I made up for him, but the reason I could inject him so strongly with them is because I have observed them in so many different people. 

So Dale Sampson is not me.  I am not Dale Sampson.  But he definitely sprang from a part of me I once knew, so I took that awkward period of my adolescent life and put it on steroids to make Dale into the introvert I wanted him to be. 

Anyone who knows me well and reads The Samaritan may have flashes of recognition, but that’s only because my well of experiences may be similar to yours.  Heck, some of us may share more wellwater than we would care to talk about.  But I firmly believe that fiction is what makes fiction interesting, and those bits of experience is what makes fiction believable.

So there you go.  These characters are a work of fiction, but the author and his experiences are not.