The Trusty Sidekick

This is my best friend, Bailey-girl.

I was down in Tampa, Florida this weekend for a quick vacation to see my very dear friend Bailey-girl and another old friend Scott. Since I'd been feeling a little "blah" lately, I decided to get a hotel room and just head down there with no plan except to take my own advice. Advice taken.

Anyway, while I was there, some very interesting ideas for my book came about. Backstories of some characters emerged from discussions with my friends about their own pasts. It's amazing how fiction mirrors reality. It's even more amazing how a little time spent in a different place can completely revitalize your writing juices.

One of the backstories I ruminated on during my stay in Tampa is that of Rom, who becomes a friend of my lead character, Aylin. He's had such a rough life, and the more I work on him, the more downtrodden and bitter he becomes. It is astounding how real to me he is. Of any of my characters, his is the first voice I have been able to hear speaking his dialogue. From him, magically, other characters sprang to life with new completeness.

And isn't that what a good friend does? Good friends make you realize things about yourself that you didn't know were there. Bailey-girl does that for me, and Rom does that for Aylin. At least insofar as while I write Rom, truths about Aylin conveniently present themselves to me.

I want to stress that Rom is not a sidekick. I don't write sidekicks. I don't believe there's any such thing as a sidekick in the complex myriad of human relationships, and I don't think they belong in fiction. People are people. Everyone is the main character in their own story, and while this story happens to be about Aylin, I could easily write a book about Rom. He is human, and his choices are his own. If he chooses to help Aylin, he does so as the hero of his own story, not as a sidekick in Aylin's.

Speaking of sidekicks, whenever there's one in a story, I always mistrust them. Don't you?
Why are they there, being a sidekick for the hero, instead of off doing their own thing? It's very suspicious.
 Robin, why don't you go get your own glory instead of mooching off of Batman, eh?!

Go to a Place...

From the Louvre at sunset.

Today I was reading a very interesting book on plot and structure (in the bathroom). In this book, it said a lot of things that I think most writers accept as the basic rules of writing. But it also had some great ideas for ways to come up with plot. There was one suggestion (there were twenty or something), that read "go to a place and drink it in."
I, however, misread it as "go to a place and drink in it."
That makes much more sense to me that some quixotic nonsense like "drink it in". What does that even mean? Anyway, I think my accidental misreading was really my subconscious trying to give me some more digestible advice. I take it to mean something like, "go somewhere -- anywhere -- and just hang out. Grab a drink. Get into trouble. Do something real there, instead of site-seeing." That's the kind of thing people want to read about. And I think that's the kind of thing people want to write as well. 

Don't keep life at arm's length. Hold history in your hands. Sucker punch convention. Get drunk. Get lost.
Truth will find you.