From the Fiction Desk

As I sit down and begin working on a character for a short story or a novel, I find myself asking if characters are really created. When I think of the term created, I am mentally taken back to my youth of creating characters for role-playing games—roll this dice to find out how strong your character will be, and now this one to learn how much intelligence they have. The method used in such games is truly creating a character. You are using random chance to make a character and give them most of their attributes. Of course, the player’s imagination comes into it afterwards to create the back-story and the personality, based upon all the selections and the random throw of dice. This is not what I do for fiction.

In fiction writing I find that I am not actually creating a character so much as meeting or casting a character. How is it different, other than the roll of dice? Imagine you are planning to write a murder mystery and you have to create your hero. Who is he? Is he even an he? For this example, let’s pretend that I do not have a preconceived character for this role, but I do know he is a professional detective. That leaves a few options open. In my mind I imagine that I am now in a big room with my possible mental detectives divided into categories: investigative reporters, local police detectives, federal agents, private eyes. All the images are as if seen through smeared glasses. I have to decide what kind of detective I want. Let’s pretend I select a local police detective.

Now, the next question is: Do I know any in real life? Why is that my next question? In my writing I like realistically and sadly movies and television often do not display realistic detectives. So I use this as a filter to rid myself of the “Hollywood” stereotypes. With that completed I move on in my “casting” of my detective and come back to the elusive first question “Who is he?” I might play around in my head and “interview” some of the “idea characters” I have—not unlike an imaginary version of a job interview, but with more in depth questions. I ask the character what he wants, why he is here, and where he thinks he is going. We talk about his childhood, his parents and siblings, his adult life. Family is explored in depth as are his dreams, desires, and his motiviation. As I do this, I take notes that would form into the character I write.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for more information on the stories I write and other events. Please also note that I have changed the schedule of my blogs. The new schedule is on my website.

You read in all the advice books and magazine articles that it is critical to keep your writing time sacrosanct, not letting anything interfere with it, no matter what. This is a lesson that is very hard to learn. As a part time writer with the determination to turn this part time career into a full time one, I find this to be extremely difficult to master. It is not the concept, but the timing. It could be the bill paying job that I have—which puts me at the mercy of not only the company whim on time, but also at the whim of outside attorneys, courts, the Federal Government, and two State Governments. If it was not for the skills of time management that I have learned, I would not be able to do my job nevertheless think about writing.

Yet with determination I still steal time to write. Sometimes this is not too hard, but lately it has been a task to make Heracles whistle in admiration despite his own twelve labors. It seems my writing schedule is much like the taunting of Tantalus, just out of reach. To even begin to ponder writing, I am having to sacrifice time with family, friends, even outside activities (such as fitness and martial arts), and sleep (food, other things too).

Despite my tribulations, the fact is that these advisors of time management are correct. To grow and to achieve as a craftsman of words, you do have to keep honor and keep sacred your writing time. It is in the method of execution that grants the writer flexibility in doing it. How do I do it?

1. I set my goals months in advance and on a daily basis
2. I take everything I am doing and prioritize it in two ways—as I learned by attending a Franklin Covey seminar.

I give everything a letter A-D. A is top priority and must be done immediately. B is for those important priorities that must be done, but are not immediate. C is reserved for those things that are important, but are not more important than the B list. D is for the “Trash” (my term). D is for all those things that are stopping me from achieved my As and Bs.

With this list of “lettered priorities” I then continue to number them in importance. In other words, I take all my As and number them, then my Bs and so forth. My Ds should have been eliminated.

Then I start to work.
3. Next I turn off the phone, the internet—I don’t even write at home so I would have to worry about the TV, my cat, or people stopping by.
4. Then I work though my list…

This doesn’t always keep me from having to sacrifice my writing time, but it helps keep it at the forefront so that I know when I sacrificed it, it was for a good justifiable reason.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for blogs and updates to my articles, short stories, novels, and novellas that I am writing.

I am posting this on all my blogs. Due to an extra project at my “bill paying job” I have been finding it hard to find time to write, nevertheless blog. I hope to have that schedule under control soon. Please keep checking for updates. I hope to have one up by the end of the weekend on all of these.

Thank you
David Alan Lucas

You have plotted out a story. Your characters are well thought out, three dimensional, with separate personalities. They have driven your story and everything looks good—until there comes a scene you are convinced you must have. The characters do not want to do this scene. In order to force them you have to move them as mental chess pieces on the board. Would you do it?

In my early writings I did. It was a big mistake that I didn’t realize back then. It would be years before I realized how big of a mistake it was, and then only when I read another writer making it. The lesson came to me while reading a novel written by a contemporary novelist who had written one of my favorite all time horror novels. I am not going to reveal the novel or the author—I am not going to critique the novel. I am focusing on what the author did and my reaction as a reader.

It is fascinating to think back to when I read this novel and realize that I would not have learned the lesson if I had listened to another reader’s advice, “Don’t read the epilogue.” I had spent days reading the novel, following a character who was a strong self-made man. You could imagine this character growing up on the streets and making himself into a great success. In the final chapter of the book, he fights with the antagonist in a life and death struggle. The chapter ends with a “fade to black,” leaving the reader to wonder what had happened.

How could I not read the epilogue? I wanted to know what had happened. My heart was racing after the final scene. I blindly ignored the other reader’s advice and read on. I wish to this day, over 17 years later, that I had not. In the epilogue, the character is recovering from the fight and a personal loss of a loved one. Of course, I realize the character is to seem broken and crushed by the experience. Instead of showing a broken man, the author chose to show a man who has gone from being this ultra-strong character to being one of the world’s greatest whiners.

To help my reader understand, allow me to use an archetype character: Superman. Imagine if you would, this great “man of steal” suddenly, after a great loss turning into the proverbial underweight nerd on the beach who will let muscle men kick sand in his face. The change in character seemed forced—instead of broken, the character seemed to be a puppet of the author in a failed attempt to show the misery the character felt.

Of course, this is all my interpretation of the work. The result of the me reading the epilogue and the way I felt afterwards resulted in me not reading another book by this author for fifteen years—and then with trepidation. It was a lesson I hope and pray that my muse has learned well.

Thank you for reading. Please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for more information on the blogs, short stories, and novels that I write. Soon, a new category will be added.

When I studied for my bachelor’s degree in Education, I took a course in African American literature. I read the course description and decided that I knew next to nothing about it. The writer in me was open to exploring new thoughts and ideas. What I discovered was eye opening in ways the professor never intended—or at least not overtly.

I learned that in writing we tend to aim for the culture we live in. This is as obvious as the fact we need oxygen to breathe, but there is something wrong with this paradigm. Does that mean because I grew up in one culture that I cannot reach for the others? As I read the words of Charles W. Chestnut and other authors of the Harlem Renaissance, I felt them reaching out beyond their culture to even people like me, opening a window on a world I thought I saw, but never did.

Writers cannot write from within their ivory towers about the world they think they know without stepping in to that world and experiencing it. We may be raised in one culture, but no culture exists in its own isolated universe. All cultures move and intertwine, separated by imaginary lines or ways of thinking that can be alien to another. As a writer I want to be like a mountain range or a river, not seeing the borders—instead writing to reach everyone I can with the stories I weave.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for updates on the blogs, short stories, and novels I write.