Standalone Characters: Making Each Brief Encounter A Night to Remember

I thought I would write something different: a literary short mystery in the third person. I got one paragraph out, a description of the lush North Florida setting of my fictional writers’ workshop. Then the tart voice of a menopausal woman remarked, “At least the little literette could write.” And my protagonist Hester was born. By taking over the story and telling it in her unique first-person voice, she brought it to life. The “little literette” was the trophy-age grad student who’d stolen Hester’s aging husband. What was Hester going to do about it? I don’t outline, and neither does Hester. But Hester was workshopping her novel, The Bigamist’s Wife, and I had five thousand words.

Character and voice are my greatest strengths as a writer. I have two long-running series, one contemporary and one historical. Its protagonists and strong supporting characters have been talking on the page and in my head in the Bruce Kohler Mysteries since 2003 and in the Mendoza Family Saga since 2008. But a character in a standalone short story, as Shakespeare put it, “struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.” Making standalone characters count is both a challenge and an opportunity that I’ve met in a variety of ways. Some of the results appear in my new collection, Rifts & Reprisals:Collected Stories II.

How Hester deals with her husband’s infidelity with the “little literette” appears in “A Work in Progress,” which originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Another betrayed wife finds a very different solution elsewhere in the collection.

Andy is the first-person protagonist of “Who Stole the Afikomen?” The story first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and was selected by Rob Lopresti as the “best story I read this week” on his blog Little Big Crimes on April 4, 2021. It's also in Rifts & Reprisals. Andy’s the Irish Catholic fiancé of a Jewish lawyer who’s taken him home for Passover to meet her family. Rob thought it was hilarious. He quoted some of my own favorite lines.

Uncle Manny kept saying, "Focus, people, focus. We've got a goal here."
"To get the Jews out of Egypt?" I whispered.
"To get past the rabbis to the gefilte fish," Sharon whispered back.
"Is that the Promised Land?"
"The pot roast is the Promised Land."

My own family was less eccentric than Sharon’s and didn’t have Yiddish accents, but in some respects I based the fictional Seder on memories of ours, of my Irish Catholic husband who was once such a newcomer, and on the anomalies of a mixed marriage. I wrote a serious “Passover” poem about the real-life first Seder in 1978. This time, I wanted to have fun.

“Never Again,” first published in the anthology Me Too Short Stories, had two protagonists: Valerie, a teenager whose father had molested her since the age of four, and Frances, the obese survivor of childhood abuse by the son of her church’s pastor, now married to an abusive alcoholic. Both of these characters’ experiences are not uncommon in real life, as I know very well from my work as a therapist. Sure, to some extent I was going for shock value. But that wasn’t the point. Valerie’s and Frances’s stories carry a powerful message. They are crying out to be heard. I wanted readers to get that and empathize—and cheer when...you can find out in Rifts & Reprisals.

Here's Valerie:
Once, when she was seven, Valerie tried to tell her mom what her dad was doing to her. The sex ed teacher talked about that: "Tell a trusted adult what's going on. You don't have to deal with this alone." Not that they taught sex education to kids that young. It wasn't appropriate, even though it happened to four-year-olds.

And here’s Frances:
She’d had a neighbor once, a thin neighbor, who’d become sort of a friend. Sitting over coffee at Ivy’s kitchen table one morning, she tried to explain what it was like to be invisible. Because she was so fat, no one ever looked at her as if they wanted to do what the preacher’s son had done. But the fat also blotted out Frances. Sad Frances. Mad Frances. Frances who might want to scream or even crack a joke once in a while. Ivy didn’t get it. “But you’re very visible!” she said. “No,” Frances said. “I’m conspicuous.” Ivy moved away soon after that, and Frances never tried again.

“Vice Cop,” first published in Black Cat Mystery Magazine, is the story in Rifts & Reprisals that comes closest to a police procedural. The two protagonists are a vice cop dad and his teenage daughter, who sets out to help by trapping an online predator she’s sure she can outwit. I not only had to make each of them memorable, but I also had to distinguish them from one another within the relatively brief span of 7,000 words and the confines of a complicated plot. To emphasize that the all-important voice was different for each of them, I wrote fifteen-year-old Gracie in the third person present tense, as well as doing my best to have her think like a kid with an irrational belief that she’s invincible. I alternated her POV with that of the first person narrator, juggling the incompatible roles of ace detective who finally has the bad guy in his sights and worried dad in a situation that’s spinning out of control.

There are a couple of flash stories in Rifts & Reprisals and a few more in its companion volume of standalones, Breaches & Betrayals: Collected Stories. I’ve lived with some of my characters for twenty years, as I have with Bruce, Barbara, and Jimmy of the Bruce Kohler Mysteries. I’ve met others only for the space of five hundred words, like the young Sixties woman in “Don’t Think Twice” who is getting sick and tired of all those guys in Cambridge, MA who keep singing that damn Dylan song. Either way, I love them all.