‘“What do you have in common with Alan, your main character?”
If you read my last post, you’ll know how I feel about fiction coming to life and life coming to fiction. One has an advantage over the other, but who knows by how much.
Alan is an extension of myself, yes. In my first novel, I knew I had to give the main character a voice a lot like mine so that it would be a little easier to transition from shit I just needed to write into prose that would make sense for the novel. If I’m being more honest, though, that’s a bit of a stretch. I don’t think I had that much foresight. Alan was always me, not because it was the wise, writer thing to do, but because the book is too much a part of me to leave myself out of it.
Alan loves words, loves people, loves life. Stephanie Stringham wrote the following about my novel: “Lyrical and beautiful expression of love between a father and a son. Perfectly captures my sentiments of words, and feeling a natural calling, a pull to words, experienced by writers and editors and others who work with and toy with language as a way of life.” I think what she’s getting is myself shining through via Alan’s voice. We both love words, and it’s obvious to anyone who’s interacted with us.
In a very Thanksgiving-appropriate way, I think what I most have in common with him is the ability to appreciate, to be thankful for the happiness that most people ignore, the ability to see perfection where others see mediocrity, the ability to turn the mundane into the beautiful, just by phrasing it the right way.
We share plenty of memories, which should be expected of a debut writer and his first main character. We love the same things, like tomatoes, and girls whose names start with the letter ‘D.’ (Two out of the two girls I’ve been in mutual love with had names that started with that letter. It’s a strange observation to make, since it might not mean anything/ is very unlikely to. Who knows what loving people with a certain letter in their name says about us? If someone had come up to me as an eight-year old and said, “You will love two girls whose name starts with the letter D,” how would I have reacted? Would I have rejected the notion, since at the time I couldn’t feel anything toward the letter, even its sound or its shape.)
We share great parenting, although he has only a father, and that broke my mother’s heart, on some level. Alan knows a lot of the same people I do, although in his words they’re meshed together, and sometimes their lives are only a sentence long.
As you may have picked up on from the novel’s synopsis, Alan has a desire to help people. I think this stems from a book both he and I have read. It’s called Timbuktu by Paul Auster, and one line Alan and I have been repeating to ourselves and tons of others is: “ That’s all I’ve ever dreamed of, Mr. Bones. To make the world a better place. To bring some beauty to the drab, humdrum corners of the soul. You can do it with a toaster, you can do it with a poem, you can do it by reaching out your hand to a stranger. It doesn’t matter what form it takes. To leave the world a little better than you found it. That’s the best a man can ever do.”
Alan and I are both trying to leave behind a better world and the only way we know how is through our writing and our natural predilection toward kindness, the appreciation of beauty, and our unnamed need to share both with the world.
is that good.”
