Know Jack #487 Stout-Hearted Fellow

You have to have a stout heart to be an author. I can’t speak for others, but my characters all like to complain. I mean, I give them a voice the world can hear, and what do they do? They blame me for being a busybody and telling their secrets all over town. I never get an “atta boy”, only a string of “about time you got it right”.

Take Ed Landry, for example. He loves to complain about how that trouble seems to seek him out, and how his desire to help others always gets him into hot water. To hear him tell it, no good deed goes unpunished. Where does he get those ideas? You, in the back, stop that laughing. Okay, maybe he can blame a few of his troublesome notions on me. After all, we do share a single head and ideas are bound to bounce off of each other every now and then. Who’s to say he didn’t come up with those ideas first?

When people ask me where I get my ideas, do I take the credit? No. Shooting Magic Mike wasn’t my idea. Magic Mike wasn’t even in my original story. I suspect Landry came up with him just to have someone to take his frustration out on, knowing he could blame me for the man’s death if readers didn’t like it. I’m not seeking sympathy. I’ve gotten used to it.

It seems to me it would be simpler and more forthright of my invisible friends to just suck it up. Things are tough all over. I don’t complain about being the man behind the curtain. Yet let Landry not get mentioned until Chapter 4, and I’m rewriting the start of the book four times just to satisfy him.

Now, I admit that it is part of my life’s work to come up with messes for my characters to get into. However, their whole “why me?” kind of thinking is a gross overreaction. I always get them out alive, don’t I? Well, so far.

Maybe Hemingway was right about the proper state of mind for writing versus that for editing. If that’s true, perhaps I get along with my characters not because I’m a stout-hearted fellow, but because I’m a stout fellow at heart.