The image of the writer as recluse is necessarily accurate to a certain degree. One cannot write a large body of work without significant periods of isolation. Along these lines I have been accused of being a recluse, and have had more than one female suitor declare that I will die a lonely old man. These periods of writing in an office, study, the bedroom where I wrote my first book, the dining room where I wrote my second and third books, or classically in an all purpose rented room like some alcoholic poet, is only a reflection of your subject matter; which is the world; that place you go to for your character sketches.

As a history writer I once wrote from a stack of books, though even that stack had to be gathered, and even partially read as I bussed it home from library and book store. A fiction writer, however, has to present a cast of characters, and if they all speak with his voice his efforts are doomed. Think of Goya and his character sketches; that is what a fiction writer brings to the reader, characters. Not only have I sought out characters, but have spent decades stumbling through what an ancient Chinese curse declared to be ‘interesting times’. Rather than looking for the macabre, I envision the writer’s job as taking that interesting walk for the reader, and reweaving it into a more meaningful story than that walk just taken on the gray side of life.

Since 1996 I have been deliberately collecting tales and recording the characters involved for the project which eventually became Harm City. But to a large degree the economics of life have intruded on, or more often precluded, such deliberate ‘research’. I would have to say that just making it through the day with those to whom life brought me; often seemingly the least character-worthy folks, has brought the most understanding as to what makes a character tick. And the point to that realization is that what makes a character is anything but a template.

People are too complicated to even describe let alone categorize. By 1999 I had finally realized that the best way to present a character, in fiction or nonfiction, was to get out of the way as much as possible and let them attempt it themselves. If you have ever really tried to describe yourself, your person, to a first date, a new coworker, or even a doctor, recall how impossible it was; how deeply you were sure that you would fail in some way. How difficult is it not to come off like a phony on a dating site or in an e-mail? And, since you were trying to describe your whole self, you failed miserably, achieved nothing but misunderstanding.

So it goes with most people one might attempt to communicate themselves to. But a reader, a reader is someone especially curious, someone trying to understand rather than categorize. Even if the reader is only escaping from reality for an hour or two, they have an urge to feel and experience what the character does, to empathize with them. And, the reader is not using the character; is not going to clean out Doctor Robinson’s bank account to pay down their former boyfriend’s credit card debt; is not angling Whiff Gleason into a bad business venture. The reader is removed from the social scene and is inherently neutral and non-predatory, so actually wants to know the character rather than use them; which makes the reader in this construct somewhat more fictional then the characters!

And the key to letting the reader get to know the character is to let that character express their self as unsuccessfully as we all tend to do. Let the characters speak for themselves, and, just like in an oral history, the characters that most endear themselves to the fiction reader are the ones who speak to the reader about the world through the writer, rather than about themselves.

I have worked with people on every level from bum to business owner. Most of them would defy a template if one were employed to reconstruct them for fiction. I must constantly remind myself to seek the subject’s perspective. The simplest way for me to do this is to seek their opinion about the fate or actions of a third party*. I never ask what they think about a person, but what they think about what happened to that person, or that person’s situation or actions. I find people to be most revealing when trying to figure out someone else’s actions or predicament.

I began writing this piece when I discovered that I had unconsciously evolved a character I had patterned on a former coworker to reflect the character of a man I am currently interviewing. A highly educated friend of mine recently told me that my ‘blogging’ is nothing new or modern for a writer, but is just our current version of the ‘author’s note book’. So it appears this half-assed essay [not even half, I know] has served its purpose.

At the beginning, up there at the top of the page, about an hour ago in my time, but just minutes in yours, I had a nagging question about Bruco, a major supporting character in God’s Picture Maker, a Sunset novel that I have been writing in stages for five months now so that I could come back and study the characters before letting them continue. I based his personality on Adam, and have maintained Adam’s sense of humor through all the trials of this man that was born in the stone-age, raised by conquistadors, and brought to the 21st Century by a bleeding-heart humanitarian time-traveler.

Lately Bruco has been out of control, getting away from the author that is supposed to have him under his thumb; the author that is supposed to knockout Bruco’s last four chapters tomorrow. What has been going on?

I finally figured it out, Big Chev, a former coworker who I have been interviewing for my violence and racism nonfiction work in Harm City, is in Bruco too. Bruco still has Adam’s sense of humor and hang-ups. However, since Bruco’s hatreds and physical appearance [from his historical back-story as a Canary Islander] are more in line with Big Chev’s characteristics, I have been—unwittingly—letting Bruco resolve situations as if he were Big Chev. Big Chev with Adam’s sense of humor, a stone-age skill set and a medieval mindset? No wonder I’m having such a good time.

So there it is Professor, my notebook on Bruco, the last man that anyone should have sent looking for Leonardo De Vinci.

*This technique is demonstrated in the blog article Alienation Nation: Defining Cultural Free Fall.