How Do You Shape A Character Who's Had Experiences You Haven't?

Fiction involves a mix of experience, research, and imagination, with the first two both grounding and boosting the third. And if you’re familiar with the endnotes of my books, the photos I post of the places I visit for research, and my Mistakes page (because despite all my efforts, I sometimes fall short), you know I work hard in the service of accuracy and realism.

When I teach writing, I always suggest building characters on a foundation of what humans have in common, with what’s different or unique about the individual in question used more like a spice than like a fundamental ingredient. Of course differences are critical, but they tend to act on what we already have in common. Too much emphasis on differences and not enough appreciation of shared humanity can result in characters feeling two-dimensional or otherwise unrealistic and not compelling.

Some of my characters are more like me than others, and the more differences, the more I need to inform my imagination with research. It can be a lot of work, but I always feel the results are worth it. Some of that affirmation comes from within, but sometimes it’s delivered from outside. Here’s an example of the latter—from Chris Brainerd, who took the trouble to offer some thoughts about my Graveyard of Memories paraplegic character Sayaka and who gave me permission to post it here. Sayaka and I have a lot of differences. But I think starting with everything I know about humans, and shaping and sculpting that based on my research about the specifics, paid off.

Thank you Cameron for suggesting a character in a wheelchair and for helping me get the details right. I think Sayaka is incomparably richer for it, and her romance with Rain more poignant. And thank you Chris for the email below. I’m proud of my my Mistakes page (journalists might consider employing something similar), but it’s good to get feedback that doesn’t belong there, too.

* * * * *

Hi Barry,

I’ve been on bedrest since November, with not a whole lot to keep myself busy. Fortunately, I stumbled across Rain Fall on a streaming service and that led me to looking up the character and realizing there is a series of books. For a couple months now, I’ve been caught up in every book I can get. I just finished Graveyard of Memories, and it made me want to reach out.

I’m in a wheelchair and the character Sayaka really surprised me. I’m also a guy, so the parts about sex as a paraplegic woman I can’t comment on (haha), but damn! You nailed life in a chair. What I particularly found impressive was John trying to find common ground with Sayaka. Seeing her as any other person and doing his best to make sure he’d thought about how to treat her and get her around. And to make it more realistic, you made him miss things she had to teach him.

And then, Sayaka relating (and achieving) her dreams. Not wanting to be stuck in one place and knowing she could do more. I felt you were either writing from experience or getting great advice from a wheelchair user. I was surprised and impressed that you pulled that off with just internet research.

I wish Sayaka could be in further books, but I’m just glad you didn't kill her off!

Anyway, just wanted to let you know how your books are helping me, and again, praise your tactful approach to disabilities.

And as a proofreader and editor, I’d also say whoever you have doing these tasks is amazing. Your prose and dialogue are tight! I love it all.

Have a great day,

Chris Brainerd

Violence and the Principles of Good Storytelling, With Wim Demeere

I had so much fun doing this podcast episode with martial arts, self-defense, and violence expert (and fellow writer) Wim Demeere. We discussed all the foregoing topics and more in the context of the principles of good storytelling. For example:

Why the fascination with violence generally? And how do you depict it compellingly on the page or screen?

Why did the Equalizer writers introduce Denzel Washington's character the way they did...and what does that introduction suggest about character introductions generally?

Why was the bathhouse scene in Eastern Promises so riveting...even though it was so unrealistic?

And much, much more!

My CIA Instructor Dutch: The Life Behind The Legend

If you’ve read my book The Chaos Kind, you might remember a certain CIA SOG (Special Operations Group) character named Dutch. And while I don’t write characters based on real people, that doesn’t mean none of my characters were inspired by them...

So yes, there is a real Dutch, who a long time ago I was extremely lucky to train under—and now you can read the story of the life behind the legend.

The other instructors I trained with at the time, who knew Dutch better and in a different context, treated their colleague with reverence and even awe—but also with great affection because Dutch inspires all those reactions, and more. But for me, Dutch was primarily a teacher, and one of the best I’ve ever had.

What makes Dutch so special?

I would say: his combination of deep knowledge based on extremely hard-won experience; his ability to translate that experience to make it comprehensible to people like me who had never been through anything remotely similar; and his patience with, and compassion and affection for, his students. All driven by his determination to impart to his students skills that would make them more capable in their roles, and on which if things went badly they would be relying on to save their lives.

My fellow trainees and I spent barely two months under Dutch’s tutelage, and yet thirty years later we still talk about him and our memories of our time with him—he makes that much of an impression. Thank you Dutch, and thank you Kim for writing this book!

Will Smith, Chris Rock, and "Violence Is Never The Answer"

Not taking a position on last night’s Smith/Rock incident. But for anyone piously intoning some version of “Violence never solves anything, violence is never the answer, violence has no place in XYZ, etc,” have you considered what discourse would be like with zero possibility of offense to words leading to violence?

Actually, you don’t have to consider it; just log on to Twitter, or spend some time on Facebook, or check out the comments section of any blog dealing with an even remotely controversial topic. This is how humans devolve into talking to each other when they know it’s impossible their words could entail physical consequences. Are you sure you want that kind of discourse in the real world, too?

Or ask any woman you know about being harassed while walking down the street or riding the subway, and again you’ll have some idea of what discourse is like when the people talking are certain there can be no physical ramifications for what they say.

Violence is a big topic. It involves more than just the physical—more even than the threat of the physical. It also involves the mere possibility of the physical. Violence and all its elements have been with humankind forever. Anyone calling for the banishment of violence should have a clear idea of what they want banished, and the roles (often hidden) violence or any other thing serves in the vast system they’re certain banishment would improve.

Cue the outrage claiming that I love violence, that I think Will Smith was justified or even that he didn’t go far enough, that I don’t think violence carries any negative consequences whether for the individuals involved or for society, that I’m saying violent offense to words is the same as self-defense to actual violence, etc. It’s social media, after all, and indulging spurious outrage is the quintessence of the medium.

But I’m really not saying any of those things. I’m just suggesting that bromides will probably deliver results less helpful than an open mind and careful thought.

Violence is a language. Before opining about how it’s good for nothing or exclusively counterproductive, it might be helpful to learn a few words.

Where's the Outrage?

 Someone asked me in another thread why I’m not outraged about Ukraine.

Of course the question assumes that if a person isn’t obviously displaying an emotion, it follows that he isn’t experiencing it. But that’s trivia. What’s important is the underlying notion that outrage is desirable. My response:

"I don’t parade my outrage and in fact distrust outrage because of its inherent pleasures. I wish more people would do the same—the Internet, at least, would be improved by it.

"Here, I’m trying to approach as rationally as I can the problem of “How can we avoid having Russia’s invasion of Ukraine become the destruction of all humanity?” There’s more than enough war fever all over the west right now. If we get through this crisis without blowing up the world, it’ll be despite outrage, not because of it. And that in a nutshell is why I work hard not to join the outrage party but instead try to stand outside it."

The person also said, "But just once, I’d like to see you say: 'Goddamnit, this must not stand.'”

My response to that:

"I’m going to have to disappoint you. I find talk like that suspiciously onanistic. Worse, if it gets loud and contagious enough, it becomes dangerous. And regardless, it does nothing to solve problems.

Numerous voices in the west have been warning for years if not decades that NATO’s relentless expansion risked provoking a war with Russia. I’ll link to just one such article below; there are countless others, coming from left, right, former US ambassadors to the USSR and Russia and other Russia experts, even from Tom Friedman. My view is those voices have been proven right. Your view, I think, is that Russia was always going to invade Ukraine no matter what because Putin is at least as inherently evil as those countless Economist covers have depicted. For the moment, what matters more to me is getting through this without a nuclear war that would turn the entire planet into something that would make what’s happening in Ukraine seem like trivia. Again, if we get that lucky, the luck will have been influenced by reason, which is a struggle, not by outrage, which is a reflex.”

A few more thoughts:

If you want to see what war fever outrage leads to, it’s interesting to consider that at the outbreak of WWI, dachshunds were slaughtered in America because of their association with the Kaiser. That was a bit before my time, but I remember so much outrage in America at France’s reluctance to become part of what turned out to be America’s disastrous second invasion of Iraq (100,000 innocent Iraqis killed; 4,000,000 refugees created) that calling French Fries Freedom Fries was all the rage (you can’t spell outrage without rage).

(I didn't have a blog at the time so I don't think there's a record of it, but I was part of that outrage. I'm not proud of it, but I have tried to learn from it.)

I think that as a species we have a better chance of survival if we keep this kind of mentality as far as possible from questions involving nuclear weapons.

More recently, innocent Russians are being punished because…they’re Russian (or at least might be).

Reason takes work. Outrage is as easy as any other reflex, and feels good, too. Which is why reason is always scarce and outrage always abundant.

Of course, this time it's different. It always is.

What America Should do About Russia's Invasion of Ukraine

From a comment I left in a Facebook thread asking me what America should do about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:

I try to look at all countries, including America, the way a Martian would. If a Martian were trying to identify the most peace-loving and the most war-loving countries on this planet, where would the Martian rank America?

Of course I could be wrong, but my guess is that the Martian—judging by military budgets, overseas military bases, and number of “military actions”—would find America to be off the charts. The Martian would probably be intrigued to note that it’s only Americans who can’t see this. I would try to address the Martian’s perplexity by explaining that human perception is massively distorted by something called the fundamental attribution error. Were the concept new to the Martian, I would advise the Martian to use the Internet to look up this extremely important key to human behavior.

Anyway. I think that unless Russia’s war in Ukraine blows up into something bigger, up to and including the end of human civilization, it will be resolved by guarantees of Ukraine neutrality, meaning no western forces in and no NATO for Ukraine (this would probably apply to Georgia, too). These have been Russia’s demands since 2008, when America first started urging NATO to admit Ukraine and Georgia as NATO’s 31st and 32nd member states, and when Russia began making clear that it would go to war rather than allow such a thing to happen.

It’s interesting to note that George Bush Sr.’s Secretary of State James Baker promised Gorbachev that in exchange for the Soviet Union acquiescing to a unified Germany becoming part of NATO (an extremely bitter pill for the USSR to swallow, given what Germany did to Russia in WWII), NATO would not expand “one inch” further east. After which, we flipped the entire Warsaw Pact into NATO and expanded the alliance all the way to Russia’s western border.

All of this is of course memory-holed in America, where Putin simply wantonly invaded Ukraine for no reason other than Peter the Great/Hitlerian dreams of conquest.

To me it feels like 1979, when Iranian students took the US embassy in Tehran and the hostage crisis began. Most Americans believed the whole thing started that day, that Iranians were just evil and for no reason wanted to give America a black eye, etc. I was 15 at the time and that’s what I thought. 1954, Mosaddegh, the entire history of US meddling and the coup that installed the murderous Shah regime…all memory-holed.

It’s always like this, but citizens seem not learn from the obvious patterns. Maybe it’s because the fight itself is so captivating; because the factors that led to the fight were hazy and not particularly cinematic and so went unnoticed by most people at the time; because once the fight is on, powerful, primitive emotions kick in and not just occlude the ability to reflect and to reason, but are so pleasurable that they cause people to *resist* reflection and reason, lest reason get in the way of the emotional high of The Good Fight.

It’s interesting to consider that the solution to conflicts is often obvious from the beginning, but ego prevents the actors from adopting the obvious solutions except at the brink. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is a perfect example. America had positioned Jupiter nuclear missiles in NATO member Turkey, on the USSR’s border. America launched the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba in 1961 (followed by the Operation Mongoose terror campaign). Cuba asked the USSR to position nuclear weapons in Cuba to forestall another US invasion and further US meddling. Khruschev agreed. America picked up the activity in satellite photos, blockaded Cuba, and threatened to sink any Soviet vessels that tried to breach the blockade.

Again, all the foregoing history is memory-holed in America. In the American popular imagination, without provocation Khrushchev aggressively and wantonly moved nuclear missiles into Cuba, after which brave John Kennedy cooly and intelligently faced Khruschev down. All that’s taught is the story of how America *resolved* the Cuban Missile Crisis. You have to go searching on your own if you want to understand what America did to *provoke* the Cuban Missile Crisis.

None of this is about blaming America, hating America, or Whataboutism, or any other such bullshit that people commonly throw up to protect their emotional attachment to the feeling that their own country is Good and the adversary is Bad. Mostly it’s about understanding that other people don’t see us the way we see ourselves, and understanding that other people don’t see themselves the way we see them. This is as old as Sun Tzu, but it’s given not much more than lip service, again and again with disastrous results.

Anyway, eventually the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved by the Soviets publicly agreeing to remove their nuclear missiles from Cuba; by America publicly promising not to invade Cuba anymore; and by America secretly promising to remove its Jupiter nuclear missiles from Turkey (secrecy required to save face for President Kennedy, even though “Please remove your nuclear missiles from just a few miles from our border, where they’re needlessly provocative” was exactly America’s complaint about what the Soviets were doing in Cuba).

The solution to Russia’s war in Ukraine seems equally obvious. Getting to it without blowing up the world is another matter.

It’s worth noting in this regard that we did almost blow up the world before resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis. There’s much more on this, but just from Wikipedia:

During the blockade, "the US Navy dropped a series of ‘signalling’ depth charges (practice depth charges the size of hand grenades) on a Soviet submarine (B-59) at the blockade line, unaware that it was armed with a nuclear-tipped torpedo with orders that allowed it to be used if the submarine was damaged by depth charges or surface fire. As the submarine was too deep to monitor any radio traffic, the captain of the B-59, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, decided that a war might already have started and wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo. The decision to launch these normally only required agreement from the two commanding officers on board, the Captain and the Political Officer. However, the commander of the submarine Flotilla, Vasily Arkhipov, was aboard B-59 and so he also had to agree. Arkhipov objected and so the nuclear launch was narrowly averted.

“On the same day a U-2 spy plane made an accidental, unauthorised ninety-minute overflight of the Soviet Union's far eastern coast. The Soviets responded by scrambling MiG fighters from Wrangel Island; in turn, the Americans launched F-102 fighters armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles over the Bering Sea.”

That’s the kind of shit that happens during the Fog of War. We have been unbelievably lucky, more times than any species deserves to be lucky. If you doubt that, Google Nuclear Close Calls.

I wish that instead of relying on luck, we would spend a little more time considering what could be done to avoid these wars and other crises. Because once they’ve begun, they seem not to get resolved except at the brink. One day, maybe this time, we’ll get to the brink and still won’t resolve it. We’ll go over. Over and out.

RIP Andrew Vachss, A Warrior Protecting Children

This morning I received extremely sad news: Andrew Vachss, a lawyer and novelist who dedicated his life to protecting children, is gone.

About ten years ago, International Thriller Writers asked a collection of novelists to contribute to a forthcoming book: Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads. My entry was about Vachss, who I didn’t know at the time other than by his reputation and through his novels, which I’d been devouring since first discovering them through the work of another writer, violence expert Marc MacYoung, in 1989. Sometime after Thrillers was published, Vachss got in touch and we became friends. We never met, though we would talk on the phone every few months. Those conversations were long and involved, and my wife Laura could always tell when I was talking to Vachss—everything about my expression and posture revealed how closely I was listening.

Vachss had an unusual and insightful take on everything: politics, writing, publishing, and most of all, human nature. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of crime, and his website will remain an invaluable resource for anyone wanting to learn more about human predators and how to combat them (as well as for thriller and mystery novelists who aspire to greater realism).

You might think someone who had seen the things Vachss had seen would be consumed by pessimism about our species. But a pessimist wouldn’t fight as hard or as long as Vachss did. I once asked him how he managed not to despair. He said, “Barry, why do you think I always ask about Emma [my daughter]?” I understood then. His calling was a battle with poisonous evil. The antidote was hearing about love. I told Em as much about Andrew as I told Andrew about Em, and I know the hug I got when I shared with Em the news about Andrew’s death would have meant a lot to him.

Vachss had a way of summing up concepts with deadly accuracy and memorable brevity. Love is a behavior, not an emotion. Behavior is the truth. Blood makes you related—love makes you family. He had no patience with platitudes like “to heal, you have to forgive.” He knew that forgiveness is a choice, not an obligation. As he put it, justice was his vehicle, but hate was the fuel it ran on. I borrowed that concept for my character Livia Lone because it suited her so perfectly, and dedicated my book The Killer Collective to Andrew and his wife Alice Vachss, a former sex crimes prosecutor and herself a warrior against human predation. I don’t think any novelist has had as big an impact on my writing as Andrew, and without Alice’s book Sex Crimes: My Years on the Front Lines Prosecuting Rapists and Confronting Their Collaborators, Livia and her world would be far less real and compelling.

Andrew, who suffered from (though never complained about) various severe health problems, had no illusions about his own mortality. He often said that if he could go out carrying a bomb into a room filled with every child abuser on earth, he would do it gladly. Such a thing wasn’t possible, of course, at least not literally—but Andrew did give, he did dedicate, his life to the protection of children. If you want to honor his memory and his work, I’d suggest contributing to the Legislative Drafting Institute for Child Protection, an organization he founded and which even in his absence will continue to wage what Vachss called the only holy war worthy of the name.

If ever there was someone whose spirit will outlast him, it was Vachss. The world was made better by what he did with his time in it. And through all the children he saved, all the work he inspired, and all the battered souls he touched by speaking truth and abhorring bullshit, it will remain better even now that he’s gone.

Update

One more thought, about something I should have included in that last paragraph. Andrew liked to point out that child protection is crime prevention. So among the ways he made the world more positive is in a sense via a negative—crimes that would have happened, trauma that would have been inflicted, but didn’t because of Andrew’s work. Any of us might owe to Andrew the absence of some horror, and though we can’t measure such a thing, all of us are in his debt for it.