Writing Phillipe

The week has been filled with visiting and cooking and preparation for meals, but I've had a couple of opportunities to write.  On Sunday and Monday, I finalized the story I'd been working on for the North Coast Journal, the interviews with people who had left Humboldt County and now looked back upon it.  And yesterday, I spent several hours working on the fiction project I've had going for the past two months.

When I haven't written on a particular project for a couple of weeks, getting started again is like plowing the driveway.  You shove the snow three feet ahead, then you back up, cover that same ground again and go another two feet further, and then you back up, cover all that ground again and go two more feet.  That's what I did yesterday.  I read the whole 50 pages I had so far, sometimes more than once, tweaking and tuning and cleaning; and once I got to the end of what I'd had, I moved another five pages further down the road.

I told Nora, during a break, that my characters were engaging in a lot of unearned exposition.  "We don't know them well enough for them to be talking this much," I said.  "But it's helping me to get to know them, so that's okay for now."  So far, most of my characters have been pleasant, articulate, good natured... they've been me dressed up in various costumes.  But I had written one guy, Joel, who was funny and abrasive, and Mellisa the over-educated UPS driver, and two or three others who might be able to grow into their skins and become interesting.  But yesterday, I wrote the side character of Phillipe, the smug and condescending Belgian.  Phillipe may become an enjoyable foil to all of the other serious business going on around him.

I know I'll eventually have sixteen or seventeen people inhabiting this place I'm creating, and that not all of them will be as distinctly drawn as the others.  I'd created about seven of them through my previous work, and each one of them had an interesting bio if you wrote it in one sentence.  For instance:  Carson, 77, is a retired civil engineer (Bechtel) whose husband recently died.  That's an interesting type, a frame to ultimately hang compelling behavior from.  But Carson and the others are far from being characters yet.

In a way, it's kind of like casting a reality show like Survivor.  You have to have the retired professional athlete, the CEO, the drama queen, the single mom... but they aren't very interesting until they start working together or screaming at each other.

So Phillipe occurred because I needed another character at a point where my hero was about to embark on a new challenge.  I brought his frame into being in about thirty seconds, and then he just started to act up on me.  He's a jerk, and there's no other way around it.  He's very talented... and boy, does he know it.

Today, Nora and Mom and I have the dump and the post office and a shower and then the Weston Craft Fair... but a rendezvous with Phillipe awaits me this evening.