by Kris
Charlaine's recent blog (“The Chick in the Nest”) made me think about the real life people who’ve wandered into my fiction. I freely admit that real people have sparked a few of my characters. To my knowledge, they haven't influenced any novel protagonists, but they have gone on to star in a few of my short stories, not to mention turning up as failed killers and hapless victims. I actually regard getting to bump off and otherwise use people in print to be one of the perks of a mystery writer's job.
Consider a certain hairdresser, who, a number of years back, simply forgot that she left perm solution on my hair long enough to seep through my skull and melt my brain. During the year-and-a-half that it took for me to grow out her mistake, I spent more on conditioners than I did for my car. Though it's been some time now, I would probably harbor resentment against her still, had I not extracted my revenge in print ("Nothing Good Ever Came of a Bad Hair Day," Who Died in Here? - to be reprinted in my short story collection, The Rose in the Snow, coming in February '08). Now, thanks to that story, I’ve been purged of all toxic emotions and am able to move on. Even though the real woman is still out there somewhere, collecting a tidy tariff for destroying other people's hair, it gives me such a sense of well-being to know her fictional doppelganger has paid for her crime.
Or take the jerky guys in their monster pickup trucks, who think it's my responsibility to protect my car's fenders from them — they keep showing up in my stories as killers, only they're always too dumb to successfully carry out their crimes, as I'm sure they would be in real life as well. Driving defensively doesn't feel like such a burden when I know I'll get a story out of it, as well as a laugh at their expense.
And then there was a batty, albeit unusually rigid, woman on the periphery of my life at one time, who had the curious habit of insulting people out loud, to their faces, and then acting as if she hadn't said anything at all. Like those people who blurt insults through sneezes, only worse. Once when I went to her house for a party, she smiled and welcomed me, and then instantly spouted loudly to her husband, "Will you look at what she's wearing!" (I looked nice!) only to turn my way once more and warmly ask what I wanted to drink, as if that little exchange hadn't occurred at all. If I confronted her on one of her remarks, she'd insist she hadn't said anything. What are you going to do with someone like that, if not put them in print?
That woman came to inspire Charlotte Eaton, Drew's mother in Revenge of the Gypsy Queen, though her odd practice of simultaneously making and denying her boorish remarks didn't work as well in print, so I simply allowed her to be inadvertently rude in direct address.
And that's the thing about using real people — they evolve on paper, so while someone real might have inspired a character, the end product invariably experiences enough of a metamorphous as to be someone else entirely. A different back story emerges, and despite my determination to mercilessly extract my revenge, I come to understand why they are as they are, to empathize, and even sometime, to sympathize for the way life has shaped them.
Sometimes I even develop real, unexpected, affection for these characters. And yet, oddly enough, that does nothing to lessen the sense of triumph I experience for having created them. I derive such satisfaction from this practice, I'm unlikely to stop creating characters out of spite. People who irritate me still do so at their own peril.
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