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.

Stealing People

Christopher Isherwood wrote, in his novel Goodbye to Berlin, "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking." I don't live in the world Isherwood inhabited (I'm not living in 1930s Germany, to start with), but I like the analogy and readily apply it to myself; with a slight modification: I am a vacuum cleaner, on full speed, actively inhaling all that is around me, quietly storing it away for future use... And what I find of most particular value in the dust bag are the people.

A question I get asked from time to time is: Where do you get your ideas? The question no one has yet asked me is: Where do you get your characters? It's a better question. Stories are about people doing things. A plot can't exist without someone in it doing something to someone else. And even if it's a story about a lone man climbing a mountain, it's still about at least one person doing something. A plot without characters is called a landscape painting.

I've written a few plot-driven stories in the past, and not surprisingly, none of them have ever sold.

For me, plot ideas often start out as abstract thoughts or singular slivers -- snippets of information; like this one: A MAN breaks into the company safe to steal the money inside, but instead of cash, he finds a $5 box of chocolates.

A snippet can be quite simple, and often quite plain and ordinary. What can set it on fire is when, as in the above example, the MAN becomes a character; when he moves from being a "placeholder" and comes to life with a back story, motivation, and physical traits. For example, the MAN becomes Jason Andrews: a 44-year old accountant with a drinking problem, grooming issues, and a gambling addiction. He owes $5000 to a loan shark who's promised to put a bullet in his good knee if he doesn't repay the loan by Friday (deadlines always make characters leap to life). Jason is desperate. He already walks with a cane, as his other kneecap was busted from a "prior financial incident".

With the beginnings of a fleshed-out character, the plot snippet has come to life, and the story could go anywhere. BUT (and I can't underline that enough times) wherever the story does go, it's primarily because the character of the character has led it there.

So, where did Jason Andrews come from...?

I made him up. From component parts.

• An old man used to regularly catch my bus on Thursday evenings. He had a cane and a particular way of walking.
• A friend in high school accidentally got shot in the leg, and reminded everyone regularly about how much it hurt.
• A work colleague at my first job was a Colonel Blimp type. He had an exaggerated opinion of himself and talked a lot of self-important rubbish. He was also often on the phone talking to his bookie. Every call ended with him slamming down the phone.   
• I have known many men with alcohol "problems". 

Jason Andrews came from people I know (or have known, have known in passing, or have maybe just seen once).

Three characters

Many books on writing suggest compiling lists when "building" your characters, e.g. age, height, eye color, occupation, IRS number, DOB, food preferences, favorite TV program, lucky number, and so on. I've never liked this idea; lists are just random surface information. I make up my characters as I go along, fine tuning each to fit the plot, mixing and matching traits and characteristics, part "borrowed" from real people, and part out of pure invention. I'm a bit like Dr. Frankenstein -- a leg here, a motivation there, a brain from over there. In short, I steal people, and everyone I know is a potential surgery candidate for my character laboratory.

People are fascinating. Some have the depth of an ocean, some are no deeper than a puddle. Some are Rubik's Cubes, some are about as complex as a paperclip.

One question I got asked once was: Do you ever put yourself in your stories (à la Mary Sue)? No. I like writing about things that I'm not. In fact, I try not to let my personal opinions, values, or beliefs drive any of my characters. I don't like didactic writing.

The hero of the book I'm working on is a Catholic priest. I'm neither a priest nor a Catholic -- if you ever see me near a church (of any faith), it's probably because I'm admiring the architecture.

By the way, if you ever want to experience Burke's idea of the sublime (intense awe), stand right in front of the Kölner Dom (Cologne Cathedral), stare upwards, and then remind yourself that construction of this enormous and impossibly tall cathedral was begun about 350 years before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. In fact, so long ago, the first stone was laid in the same year the Aztecs kick-started their empire.

And also, by the way, thank you David Dean for your excellent recent piece: Adventures in Catholicism. It has been duly cut-and-pasted to my research folder.

So, where do you get your characters...?

Be seeing you...

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