Hello! I’m Lou Sylvre, back again, this time to talk a little bit about characters and questions, or actually two questions for characters. I wrote last month about how I plot to pants and pants over my plotting. Here’s a little bit more on how that ends up happening.

First, in my novel A Shot at Perfect I’ve got a character, say Jackie Vasquez for instance, going along and doing the necessary thing for the story, coming to LA to be with his love and Dom, Brian Harrison. He walks out of LAX alone. Now I know already Jackie hates Los Angeles, and for him the Santa Ana winds—a hot wind that blows down from the San Gabriel Mountains and rushes through the LA basin fueling fires and, some say, making people crazy—for Jackie, because of his history, that wind is a devil sign that stands for everything bad about the place.

I write the action—the plot. Jackie gets off the plane and the Santa Ana winds show up. The words sit there on the page waiting for me to write what he does next. But then I start wondering: What is that like for him?

Here’s what I ended up with:

Jackie took three steps out of the LAX terminal and felt the heat blast him from all directions. The pavement baked him from below, all the surrounding structures radiated like oven walls, and the sun threatened to broil his freckles black. But it was the wind, the devil-born Santa Ana that splashed red in his eyes and stole his breath.

Jackie remembered a time in L. A. when the Santa Anas had seemed like the touch of some blessed god, in that October when he and Josh had first wandered into the warm, dry City of Angels after a damp summer on the Seattle streets.

“Damn,” Josh had muttered. “I hope it doesn’t blow like that all the time.”

But Jackie had just shook his head, not said a word. True, he wasn’t in the habit of talking much back then. Hurt boys often don’t, he’d since learned in his psych classes. But that time his silence was one of incredulity. Jackie had loved the rough, subjugating caress of those hot winds, would have stood for days and died inside of them if he could have.

But that was before he’d seen their cruel side. Before he’d seen them weave a spell of apathy and violence on even those people who sometimes cared. Before he’d seen them spin the heads of friends around until they faced each other with fists and knives. Before he’d seen them launch bullets in back alleys. Now he knew they sometimes stripped the last inhibitions from the minds of drunks, the clothes from shaking young bodies, the last vestiges of hope from desperate hearts.
He’d almost fallen under their path. If it hadn’t been for Josh he would have.

But that was, what? Eight or nine years ago, and when he and Brian, his lover and Dom, had decided to move to L. A, Jackie hadn’t even thought about the winds. Neither Brian, nor Luki had mentioned them, but then why would they? They couldn’t possibly have any notion that it might matter to Jackie—he’d never talked about what had happened in that city to anyone except his mental health therapist and his brother, who’d been there. Years had passed since then, and honestly Jackie had all but forgotten the experience himself, possibly on purpose. But not Josh. He remembered, and he’d reminded Jackie before leaving Kaholo’s house two days ago.

“Jackie… bro. Are you sure you want to go to L. A? I mean, I don’t want to bring up bad memories but…” Josh kept talking, reminding Jackie that L. A, for all its comfortably warm nights, had nearly left him in ashes—literally.

But even then, Jackie hadn’t been fazed. He’d come a long way, had years of treatment to heal that hurt and others, had educated himself—even starting studies toward a master’s degree in criminal psychology. When Josh reminded him, he’d thought of that day, of the man who’d scared the piss out of him—literally—become disgusted by it, beat him, accidentally lit a fire but deliberately fanned it and fueled it, and left Jackie trapped in an upstairs room in a burning house. The memory hurt, he hated the thought of it, but it didn’t shake him, didn’t trigger any descent into darkness. He’d grown strong, and the past was what had made him that way. He had embraced that truth.

Until he stepped out of the LAX terminal and into the trickster wind, and memory flashed him back to that time of helplessness.

Another question comes up often: How does he know that? Truthfully, this question and answer are a product of point-of-view. I mean, depending on the “POV” I’m writing, I have a different range of possible sources of information and ways to convey those to readers.

Take for instance, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This novel’s POV is a subject of discussion, because there are so many different presentations of it, lots of journal entries and letters, etc. from a number of characters. Regardless, any journal entry or letter must be in first person, because it can contain only the observations of the character doing the writing. So, writing in first person, Stoker clues us in that the character begins to think something extraordinary is happening. But how does the character know that? Stoker has given us the clues from the characters personal experience of the situation.

Then a dog began to howl somewhere in a farmhouse far down the road, a long, agonized wailing, as if from fear. The sound was taken up by another dog, and then another and another, till, borne on the wind which now sighed softly through the Pass, a wild howling began, which seemed to come from all over the country, as far as the imagination could grasp it through the gloom of the night. ~ Dracula by Bram Stoker

And here’s an example of divulging the mind of a first-person character from my own writing, a work-in-progress I call Galea

When Leon took my hand and led me into the thicket, I tried to find in him the young man I had three short months ago brought with me to this forgotten corner of the High Fens. Male he certainly was, to my delight, yet I thought of him as my bride. Shy and perhaps a bit domestic, but soft and sweet like summer peaches.

That boy had gone. I could not tease even a trace of his plump, ripe body from the sleek, muscled form of the man I now trailed. As I stumbled behind him, this fevered tempter, I called to mind the hot, slavish passions I’d traded for that lost boy. I mourned him, my compliant bride. Yet through the mold of boggy earth I caught his siren’s scent and my desire quickened.

But not enough. Not sufficient to quench my fear. As we cleared the thicket and stepped into the open, cold crawled my spine despite the heat. The fierce light of sunset’s end caught the bog grass like tinder, climbed my lover’s shadowed skin, and lined his black silken tresses with hot sheen, as red as spilling blood.

Mostly, though, I write in third-person limited POV. That means, I’m not strictly limited to what my character actually takes note of or cogitates on, I can broaden the range of clues to give the reader to things that are in the environment that the character could know. In practice though, I usually stick fairly close to what I could show in first person, but use some liberty as to how I present it. The excerpt above from A Shot at Perfect is written in that POV. Here’s another example, from WIP Holiday Home Hotel:

By the time Halloween rolled around, conservative, respectable, reserved Gunner Schiller from North Dakota had gained a reputation as a partier. He’d even had sex with girls on two occasions at parties. He didn’t really remember much about that. The memory lapse might have been about booze, but truthfully he hadn’t been all that drunk either time, so he thought it was mostly because the act itself hadn’t been as memorable as he’d expected. Oh well, he’d thought after the second try, you live and learn.

Halloween night was to be one big mobile party. Gunny had bowed to popular opinion and decided he wouldn’t be any more damned than he already was if he dressed up, so he decided to go all out and be Satan for an evening. Tall, lithe, Daren would go as Cher, wearing a copy of one of her signature racy outfits. Gunny was all for that idea, and he told himself that was because he’d heard music-major Daren sing Cher songs at Karaoke, and he did it beautifully—the costume just made sense.

They were joined by a pair of their more raucous acquaintances—Jimmy Langdon dressed as the Lord of the Hunt, and his brother Ronny, who refused to dress up at all with the exception of donning suspenders and pretending to smoke a stogie all night. Together they started the evening at a Karaoke bar within walking distance from their home base. They ordered drinks with their fake ID and maybe the costumes helped them get away with it. But it was early in the evening, and Daren’s first turn at the mike came up before he or Gunny—who still tried to pace himself in an effort to reduce guilt over the sin of drunkenness—hadn’t had more than a sip. Oddly, Daren seemed more self-conscious singing “Love is the Groove” than Gunny remembered him being the last time he’d done the Karaoke thing. Looking like Cher—and Gunny had to admit Daren, in many ways, pulled that off quite well—evidently made him self-conscious about singing like her. Although, honestly, Daren didn’t sing like Cher. He sang like Daren, his voice tenor but enriched with overtones from all the registers, his style strong like Cher’s but, to Gunny’s inexpert but attentive ear, perhaps differently nuanced.

Gunny hadn’t really known a lot about Cher until he’d started rooming with Daren, who called the pop goddess his patron saint. In his new, wild-with-reservations life, Cher’s music seemed to fit right in with the parties and booze and pot, all of which swirled around a central core of Daren. Gunny knew Daren was at the heart of his changes, the centrifuge that had sent everything whirling, and that was okay. He figured he’d give himself a year to spin to the outside, and then settle back down—no doubt without Daren in his life. Meanwhile he gave himself over.

That Halloween night, when Daren came off the Karaoke stage after “Love is the Groove” looking down and maybe even embarrassed, Gunny had been mystified by his own need to comfort him. He’d been schooled all his life to think a man’s emotions were his own problem, and he had no reason to believe—or sense—that Daren wouldn’t be just fine once he manned-up. But he’d finished a hard drink by then, and that might have been why he even noticed Daren might need comfort. Not knowing the best way to go about such a not-so-macho thing, he ordered shots all around and challenged Daren to keep up with him.

Daren didn’t try to do that, but he did drink, and he did loosen up, and by the time his second turn for Karaoke came up, he was a lot more relaxed. Relaxed enough—or drunk enough—to trip on the top step of the stage. He recovered with a giggle, though and stood at the mike, gazing out at the audience with sultry eyes before launching into “Taxi Taxi.” Daren’s performance seemed loose and tight in all the right places and it mesmerized Gunny.

That’s my post for this month. I hope you enjoyed the peek into my writer brain. Let me know your experiences with writing or reading: As an author, what are your favorite questions to ask you characters to get deeper into the story? As a reader, what do you like to know about a character’s motivations and clues to the world around them? Oh, and if you happen to be a publisher, all of the excerpts above are from unpublished works for which I hold the rights… just sayin’ if you’re interested….

Thank you everyone for reading. Thank you Dani and the Love Bytes crew for letting me share your space! See you next month, folks. I hope May is a merry, merry month for you.