Characters: Writing Process Revealed Part IV

Characters -- we all know them.  They're the ones that seem to have walked straight out of the pages of a novel.

Writing a novel allows you to do just that -- put those characters that have crossed your world onto paper in fictionalized form. 

Sometimes the line between fiction and non-fiction is blurred.  Take, for example, Primary Colors, by Joe Klein (aka "Anonymous"), a tale about an enigmatic southern governor running for president. As Amazon.com noted in its review, "The main appeal of Primary Colors, of course, lies in guessing who's who in the fictionalization of Bill Clinton's first bid for the Democratic presidential nomination and just how much of its juicy plot is true."

Undoubtedly readers who know me who read my book will be doing so with an eye on guessing who's who.  Those readers will not be completely disappointed, but they shouldn't look too hard.  Lost in the Ivy is not Primary Colors.

There are obvious similarities between the protagonist of Lost in the Ivy, Charley Hubbs, and me.  Like Charley, I was a newspaper reporter. And as I noted in an earlier journal entry, the Wrigleyville apartment that Charley moves into is modeled after the studio I rented in the mid-1990s. Charley's thoughts sometimes are my thoughts, but that shouldn't come as a surprise since I am, after all, the author.  But what happens to Charley is purely fictional. If this were a story about the real me, it would be dreadfully boring.

As I also noted in an earlier journal entry, the Jimmie Dart character derives from a real-life Jimmy who lived across the hall from me.  But as I noted before, I knew almost nothing about the real-life Jimmy.  The character Jimmie is purely a product of my imagination.

Other central characters, Elizabeth "Lizzy" Zappler and Danny Piper, bear almost no resemblance to anyone I know or have known.  They, too, came to life out of my brain.

Some lesser characters, like the judge and the newspaper editor, are composites of real-life judges and newspaper editors I have known.  If you know or have known any judges or newspaper editors, you know that they are almost always novel-worthy characters.

I will acknowledge that there are two characters in the book that are fictional recreations of real-life characters.  I do not believe that I am spoiling anything for you by revealing them to you here.

The real-life CamusOne is the character of Camus (pronounced Kah-moo), the cat in the book.  He is modeled, unapologetically, after my cat of the same name, who is, of course, named after the French existentialist author, Albert Camus.  There are differences between the fictional Camus and the real-life Camus, however.  The fictional Camus is Persian while the real-life Camus is Siamese.  Also, the fictional Camus is slightly more plump than the real-life Camus. 

The other is the bouncer at the Ginger Man tavern.  He is unnamed in the book and appears only once but is a fictionalized depiction of Bobby Scarpelli, the real-life bouncer who opened the doors to the Ginger Man when I frequented it in the mid-1990s.  As Sun-Times reporter Dave Hoekstra eloquently reported in a loving tribute to Bobby on May 28, 1998, Bobby opened the doors to a lot of hearts. Bobby, who Hoekstra described as "Chicago's best known rock 'n' roll bouncer, died at age 50 of complications from liver disease. To me a huge part of the Ginger Man and the Wrigleyville I knew died with him.