Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Characters

If you read my blog you probably know that one of my techniques for writing is to get my characters to talking and have them tell me the story. I'm not very good at thinking stuff up. Hesiod, who was a contemporary of Homer said that excellence was to be found in three types of minds...I'm paraphrasing..The first category can think great stuff up and this is the highest form....the second knows great stuff when they see it and that is pretty good too. The third can do neither, so sad, and they account for very little. Machiavelli picked up on this idea without attributing the source. So if that's true, there is some hope for us. True we might not be blessed with the highest form of excellence, like Einstein or other great intellects, but if we can just know excellence when we see it, that is not so shabby. If we know what excellence is at least we can work with it. The world could care less who thinks it up.

Now as I listen to my characters talk I know when they're "woofing" and when someone or something shows up, who knows what they're talking about. It's important to realize that none of this creativity I'm referring to is originating in my mind...It's brushing by and as a writer, I'm listening in on the conversations of people or spirits that just happen to drop into my head and start shooting the bull. Fortunately I didn't just fall off the potato wagon. My character was forged in combat units of Vietnam and amid some heat...as they say "I dared to kiss the hot rock and Whew! it was hot". So when I hear these characters batting things around I have a pretty good sense if they are describing the way things are or the way they wish things were. Herein lies the dilemma.

Fiction requires characters that are bigger than life; heros are heroic, villains are vile, little people rise up and triumph and the ugly truth gets swept under the carpet. Readers know better than anyone how tough life can be and read to escape from the oppression, not wallow in it. Most have had enough wallowing in their lives and like to sit down in the evening with a little light reading. We suspend disbelief (Where have you heard that before?) and enter a different and refreshing world. Fiction is like a relief valve that allows us to blow off some steam, maybe have a little excitement, laugh a little maybe a little catharsis... then its time to turn out the light and get some sleep.

The characters who visit me, however are not bigger than life. They are like the men and woman I served with and they are full of warts, do not enter beauty pageants, and wear the scars of life. Their lives were defined by poor decisions and unrealized expectations. They are like a ghost convoy of WW2 merchant ships passing in the fog of night, their superstructures full of gaping holes, scorch marks, their engines chugging and props churning in an almost haunting cadence...these are not cruise ship characters that drop by the video of my imagination as it flickers in the wee hours of the morning. These are souls that were "ridden hard and put away wet."

Now who in the world is going to want to read a novel about such a disreputable cast of characters....the answer is not very many...yes I know about novels like the Grapes of Wrath and All Quite on the Western Front, but today readers don't seem to be drawn to the same kind of literature that was once considered classic, less than a decade ago. Now they want action instead of exposition, they want to be entertained rather than have their faces shoved in reality. So do the characters who visit me, who pop in, often unexpectedly have nothing to offer? Actually they have plenty.

They tell great stories and a great story line is half the battle to writing good literature. Once you have that, you can embellish all you want. What is belief after all? To a reader it has an almost amorphous quality. Still a writer ventures too far from reality at great peril and credibility lurks in the details. Go ahead and make your characters bigger than life, but try and leave that thread of humanity that resonates with truth. People are a composite of many things, good and bad...to me a good story has characters that are struggling to give the good inside them ascendancy over the bad...I love that sort of conflict. Instead of the enemy being some external force I love to see the enemy inside a character, as the greatest adversity, and the struggle and conflict as they try and reconcile the world as it is with what they would make of it.