Pure Writerly Moments 2 (Short Stories, Essays, Book Reviews, and More)

Character Sketch - The Paratrooper (Statues in the Cloud)

The Synopsis for the Novel "Statues in the Cloud"

One day, a writer in Japan receives a letter from a young fan who is dying from a mysterious disease. The young fan, Aya, gives the writer a challenge -- come to Nagasaki and help find seven pieces of a statue. If you can help me do this simple thing, she tells him, you will have cured me. What the writer soon finds out is that finding the seven pieces means telling the stories of seven unique individuals: a politician, a soldier, a folk hero, a dancer, an AI, a writer, and the story of Aya herself.

I want to write to you about the process of writing a character. This character is one of seven main characters for the novel "Statues in the Cloud."

My reasons for writing this are two-fold: To help me think about the character and to provide a guide for writers on how to develop characters.

The character of the "paratrooper" or soldier was developed out of my need to pay homage to my late great writing teacher Lester Goran. 

In many ways, the character of the paratrooper is an amalgam of his character from the "Paratrooper of Mechanic Avenue" and Lester himself. The idea was that I would start with the "paratrooper" of "Paratrooper of Mechanic Avenue," and let the character evolve naturally.

Ike-O Hartwell. The name of the character in Lester's first novel. That's where I would start.

And then through writing and remembering Lester Goran, I would end up with Tommy Donnelly -- son of Iris Donnelly and...perhaps, maybe...Isaac Donnelly. Though, we are led to believe that Isaac Donnelly is really a myth created by Tommy's mother. We never learn the true story of Tommy Donnelly's father. Was he a drunk? Was he a hero? Was his name even Isaac? We're never sure. And, more importantly, we're left to wonder: Does it matter?

In preparation to write this character, I read several Lester Goran books -- "The Paratrooper of Mechanic Avenue," "Bing Crosby's Last Song," and his short story collection "Tales from the Irish Club."

Good writing is good research. But more than that, I wanted to read Lester's works to get a sense of the aesthetic. I wanted the sections with the paratrooper to feel like a Lester Goran novel.

In Lester's books, place is always a character.

Here are my notes from Lester's books:

"The blighted business area on Mechanic Avenue fit only for store-front religions, gypsies, saloons, pawnshops, poolrooms, and permanently condemned tenements."

"the twisting slum of small wooden frame houses, cobble-stoned alleys, speakeasies, brothels, and brown tenements sneaking around and converging on Mechanic Avenue."

"The fortunate among us lived in single-family houses on Robinson or Dunseith or else Forbes: the rest, like me, lived in the apartment government complex called Terrace Village II"

"the great cathedral on Fifth, St. Paul's, rather than the more modest St. Agnes at the corner of Robinson and Fifth, bordering Soho district and Oakland. Soho itself was still the home of an occasional respectable family, but below it immediately was the wild mix of nationalities and colors at the Brady Street Bridge..."

In the stories that take place in Oakland Avenue (not Mechanic Avenue), the key places are: Ancient Order of Hibernians, Local No. 9, also known as the Irish Club. Lester doesn't know when they started but they shut their doors in 1965; St. Agnes's Church; Blaw Knox (the name of a local prison); and Schenley High.

The hardest part about writing the character of Tommy was taking this rich geography that Lester had created and making it more generic. I felt like I didn't have a choice. The rest of the book is not written in such great detail -- perhaps it should be! -- so I had to write the geography of the paratrooper in a way that mirrored the vagueness of other chapters. 

When I look back years from now and ask how "Statues in the Cloud" failed, I might discover that I failed to make the general very specific and real the way Lester Goran did in his work.

For my character, for Tommy Donnely, the Donnellys should be royalty in their community. Their community, also, should be seen as somehow above others. The people of his community, and especially the regulars at the bar "Sobaski's Stairway," in their simplicity are better than other people. Their low status is only proof of the corruption of the world, which Tommy imagines vaguely as being perpetrated by Jews, Communists, minorities, and politicians. Because he is inarticulate, however, he has trouble communicating his worldview to the others whom he looks up to.

There are other aspects of Ike-O's experience in the mental ward that I may later incorporate into Tommy's story.

*Ike-O complains about his ankles at a medical exam, throws a fit, and is sent to the medical ward C-9.

*Every day, they are told that if they are faking it, they are liable for punishment under Article 115 of the Articles of war.

As I wrote and wrote and wrote this character I wanted to give Tommy more of a little man complex. He was always a short man looking up at the world. Thus, he was always at risk of slipping into the background. He always had something to prove.

The thing that still makes all of Lester's stories relevant today is that all of the places he wrote about were eventually overcome by time. The Irish Club was someplace that felt eternal at the time -- it was special, a place of fraternity -- and yet, it eventually closed its doors. And when it did, there was nothing to keep its legendary stories -- the lifeblood of the community and its people -- alive. What seemed so special at one moment was easily washed away by time. That is an emotion I think we can all empathize with.

I needed to make that a part of the novel, too. I needed to do it because Lester Goran's writing is all but forgotten today.

We are all in danger of being swept away, made obsolete, by the vagaries of change, technology, and the caprices of fate and time.

Special things need to be mythologized and kept alive. 

And with that line, I end this character sketch!