Fiction Scribe

I’ve been invited to do a post, and it was specifically requested that I discuss creating true-to-life, gritty characters.

I was recently going through my ‘idea book.’ This is basically a diary that I bought at a stationary store that I use as a backup to my failing internal hard drive (my mind). It’s filled with all kinds of oddities, some useful, some not. Much of it is about a single, vivid image that came to me in the moments just before sleep, or a snippet of internal thought that, again, just dropped into my mind out of nowhere.

There are all kinds of disturbing things in this diary. Such as this entry, where I imagined a serial killer expounding on the joys of murder: “The stars are never quite as bright as when I’m killing someone. It’s when, for me, the moon’s at its fullest.”

Or this one, in a similar vein: “She shakes my hand, not knowing as she does it that I just finished jacking off in the bathroom, thinking about killing her.”

Disturbing, but apropos to the whole conversation here. I’ll return to the above later. For now, let’s go to another entry I found on a recent Sunday meandering through the diary. I have no idea if I wrote this myself, or if I heard it and jotted it down. If it belongs to someone else, then I give you credit here, whoever you are… the note was:

“A heroic hero has to overcome nothing but the odds. An imperfect hero has to overcome himself as well as the odds.”

Regardless of provenance, that concept informs how I approach my protagonists. True to life requires challenges, imperfections, and flaws. It also requires that you probe not just the good side of your hero or heroine, but the bad. Everyone has three parts to them: the good, the evil, and the space in between. The average person spends the majority of their time in that ‘space in between’, trying to do more good than bad. Trying is the key word, no one succeeds at being good all the time.

When I create a character, I start with the good. I figure out the things that I like about them, that others might like as well. Then I make myself look at what could be wrong with them. What’s twisted in there? It could be something as small as eating their boogers when no one’s around or as large as a drug and alcohol problem. It could be an infidelity, or an addiction to pornography. It could also be a benign imperfection, something that’s odd and unique, like eating bananas whole, skin and all.

The point is, none of us can truly identify with perfection. We all know that, while we do our best, we frequently fail, or we have secrets that we wish we didn’t. I try and find those secrets in my protagonists, and then I try and turn them up a notch, and create the occasional internal scream.

I have similar views about the bad guys. I saw an interview with Al Pacino one time, about his role in Angels In America, where he played Roy Cohn, a pretty despicable character. He said (and this is highly highly paraphrased) that he had to find out what that character liked about himself. That evil men rarely think they’re evil – they have reasons for what they do. I think that applies to the serial killers in my novels, and I try and approach it from that view wherever possible. Everyone rationalizes, from Superman to Stalin.

Getting back to those original diary snippets, I also make myself take a good, long, hard look at what’s going on inside their minds. What does someone who likes to torture, rape, and murder think about that? What are their thoughts of joy about it? Regrets? How do they view their victims? Sometimes, that’s the hardest part of it all. Those are dark places.

Some people really enjoy my books, some have objected to the amount of pain I insert into some of my characters. I can certainly understand, but for me, it’s what works. I want my good guys to go through a knock-down drag out, blood on the canvass brawl, both physically and spiritually, by the time they come to the end of one of my novels. I want something to have been taken from them because of what they do and see, and I want them to also have learned something about that, about surviving in spite of it, because that’s life. You’re almost always going to find redemption at the finish of my books, not because I see life through rose-colored glasses, but because I see no reason to write something where everybody loses in the end. Winning over the odds is no less of a truth.

The Darker Side, which comes out in the US 29 September, is a book that let me delve into a lot of this. It deals with secrets, and a man who calls himself ‘The Preacher.’ He finds out your secrets, then he kills you because you kept them secret, then he reveals them to the world. In the midst of chasing this particular monster, Smoky Barrett (my heroine) and her team are forced to face some of their own deep dark secrets, and some of those come out into the light. Then again, some do not… it was a difficult but fulfilling book to write, and I think prior fans will approve and hope new readers will enjoy it as well.

*Click on the book cover to visit Cody’s website.