I don’t write fiction. Well, okay, I’ve been writing a long time. I have written fiction, but not much. In college, I wrote a story about Cory Seventeen and Cynthia Bluejay, an android and a sorority girl. It wasn’t good. I wrote the story because I liked the names I made up for the characters, and I wanted to see what happened to them. And then I put fiction writing away and didn’t try again for thirty years.
Last Thursday night, I attended my writers group. The topic for the evening was how to create believable characters. Here’s one of my gripes about every writers group I’ve joined. They are all fiction focused, as if only fiction writers are real writers. A group I briefly joined almost a year ago seemed baffled by my desire to write creative nonfiction. My memoir-based essays elicited such comments as “Who are you writing this for? No one wants to read this sort of thing.”
Thursday night, as I listened to the group leader discuss the plan for the session, I thought What use is character development to a memoir writer? And then I slapped on a smile and gave it my all, because the library isn’t just the host of my writers group, but also my employer, and nothing can be gained by me becoming all contrarian.
The drill for the evening was to get to know your fictional character by interviewing them. The leader assumed that everyone had a work-in-progress, a novel, or at least a short story, with a main character to better develop. I had nothing and only fifteen seconds to come up with an idea.
I fell back on Corrosion, the screenplay I thought up in 1990. It’s the story of a talented midwestern high school cyclist who moves to Washington, DC to become a bicycle messenger. Over the course of the film, he descends into and then emerges from a world of alcohol abuse and self-loathing. A hard rock soundtrack fuels the movie. Scenes of cyclists shredding the city, hopping over car hoods, and catching air off presidential monuments keep the action alive.
That’s it. That’s as far as I ever got. A great idea, I thought, but no motivation to follow through. I hadn’t written anything in years. When the movie Premium Rush came out in 2012, I realized my movie was essentially made. I dropped Corrosion for good. Until Thursday night. My bike messenger was the only character I knew.
As happens so many times at my writers group, once I started writing, my fingers seemed to take on a mind of their own and answered the prewritten interview questions without any obvious input from my brain. I could barely contain my grin as I fleshed out this guy who lurked at the back of my thoughts for so many years.
I’ve structured his answers as a first-person soliloquy, as if the interviewer was edited out of the conversation. This could be infinitely extensive, but I limited to just a bit more than I dashed out during the twenty-minute writing session.
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My family broke apart when my brother died. My parents lost it. My mother went to church and never came out. My father spent more time at work, which really meant cheating on my mom. I gave up trying two years ago. I haven’t heard from them since.
We were twins, Cory and me. Not identical. Looks, almost, but he had confidence where I didn’t. He built all our friendships. I came along as a package deal. He was a decent athlete, a decent student. He didn’t stand out anywhere, except getting along with others. He was friends with everyone. I was the opposite, unsteady, uneven. Strong at sports, terrible in school, hard to like. Now I’m terrible at being an adult. But I always make it to work on time.
Without Cory my friendships died away to nothing. If any stuck around, maybe grown, I guess it’s Dave. But that’s all him. He gives me more slack than I deserve.
When I was nineteen, this was the year after Cory died, my off and on girlfriend got pregnant. Neither of us considered the baby a potential human being, just something to eliminate as quickly as possible. That pounded a coffin nail in our relationship. I don’t hear from her, either.
When my life finally falls apart, I’ll probably call my dad. He must feel guilty about the way our family imploded. I think he’d be good for some quick cash if I needed it. My mom would tell me to come home and pray.
After work, we all get together to party. Usually at a bar, sometimes a park. Boyfriends, girlfriends, hangers on. These parties get rowdy, everyone shouting and whooping. I sometimes drink too much. I watch more than I talk, and I’m usually the last to leave.
My first full memory is Dad spinning Cory and me on our tire swing. I screamed for him to stop. When he finally did, I couldn’t walk. I threw up in the driveway. My mom hosed it away.
My apartment is nice. The basement of a house. I mean it’s a small cinder block room with no windows, but it’s cool in the summer and super quiet. I enter through two doors in the back garden. One is rotting wood, the other is metal bars like a lion cage. There’s a toilet in the center of my room, toilet paper’s on a side table.
The whole school turned out for Cory’s funeral. I wonder who would come to mine. Last summer Mark got run down by a Jeep. A few of us rented a car and drove to West Virginia for his funeral. No one came. Just his parents, us messengers, two guys he probably knew from high school. Mark was older. His life was in DC.
Oh, that’s a funny question, very corporate. In five years? I guess I’d like to own my home. Maybe a studio near Dupont. Something above ground would be nice. I plan to keep riding. I need to get better at saving money, though. Other than rent and beer, I don’t buy much. I never seem to any money left at the end of the weekend.
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If you’re still with me, thank you for your indulgence. I love that my writers group has me trying different genres. Feel free to leave a comment telling me how you feel about an occasional dip into fiction, and whether you thought this was interesting to read.
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Previously Published on jefftcann.com and is republished on Medium.
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