Whenever I give an interview, there are one or two questions that nearly always come up, and that I always avoid answering in any direct manner. It has become almost a running joke. They’re not deep, important, or even particularly interesting questions–just the sort of ordinary, obvious question that an interviewer might use to break the ice, to establish some sort of context, before diving into deeper topics. If I’d answered these questions the first time they’d been raised, then I’m fairly sure that nobody would have asked me them again–at least, nobody who had done their homework and read my earlier interviews before picking out their own questions.
Perhaps because of my initial evasion, however, the opposite has happened. I may be imagining things–I often am–but I think that it’s plausible, from the evidence on hand, that everyone who does do their homework and reads my earlier interviews sees that I’ve dodged these questions, and therefore tries, each in his or her own way, to get the answer that I have denied to their colleagues. Perhaps they suspect that there’s something interesting behind my evasiveness, or perhaps their interest is not about me at all, but instead is a sort of friendly rivalry among themselves to see who will get me to spill the beans, even though my beans tend to be more interesting un-spilled.
It’s gotten to the point where it’s become a bit silly. I don’t generally mind a little silliness, but in this case it’s drawing attention away from what I really want to discuss during my interviews, which is, as I have asserted on several occasions, usually whatever pops into my mind that day. Trying to steer the conversation toward something that I don’t really find interesting or worthy of discussion is a distraction that takes time and energy away from topics that I believe, if only perhaps for a fleeting moment, to be more interesting and worthy of discussion. Therefore, I’ve decided to attempt to lay the matter to rest once and for all, and do so here, in my blog, to be fair and not show preference to one interviewer, critique, or host over another.
Before doing so, however, I feel obligated to layer yet another level of parentheticalness to this essay: if you have no idea what I am talking about, and have never read any of my interviews, or heard me ramble on in my dull monotone for my seven minutes on some quickly forgotten radio talk show whose tape was recycled the next day after it aired, you haven’t missed anything. Nothing. You were wise to have spent the time doing whatever it was you were doing instead of becoming sucked in to my personal zeitgeist. Having no foundation in this subject is a positive symptom of living a good, productive life. Whatever discomfort you might be experiencing from temporary confusion will end abruptly before the end of the next paragraph.
The question (or questions, depending on how they are phrased) is how I came up with the characters of Victor and Adrianna, protagonists of my “Lonely Peony” novels, and Artemus Knox, a recurring and unexpectedly popular character in the “The Poodle Millennium” stories.
If you haven’t read any of these, don’t worry; they are not required reading. If you have no idea who these characters why these characters might be interesting, don’t worry; they’re not. Their only significance comes from my reticence to reveal their origins.
I hope this won’t be disappointing, but there’s not much to reveal. I don’t know where I get the ideas for my characters, except from the ones that are shallow caricatures of people I actually know, or characters I steal from the legions of better authors but less popular authors, and these are not either. Not consciously, anyway.
Here’s what I can explain in a way that isn’t a complete fabrication.
For many years, my wife and I used to rent a house on Lieutenants Island in the town of Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, for our summer vacation. It’s a very pretty area–like many of the surrounding areas–but it has one characteristic that is a bit unusual. As the name implies, it really is an island, and is connected to the rest of the Cape by a low, straight causeway across a salt marsh. When the tide comes in, the road is submerged, and the island is cut off to traffic. There’s a nice photo of the causeway here. Depending on the phase of the moon, and the wind, and whatnot, the road can be impassable for as long as two hours before and after high tide.
When it was just the two of us, being cut off from civilization for a few hours every day was not a problem. In fact, it was a bit of fun, sometimes, because groups of people stranded at either end of the causeway were known to throw impromptu parties to pass the time. It was considered a minor social obligation to have something in the trunk of your car to contribute to such an event–a few plastic cups and a bottle of bourbon, or something similarly festive and non-perishable.
Once we had kids, however, our view of the world changed. I became nervous about being trapped on the island with a child who urgently needed something not available on the island–with the most obvious and urgent need being medical attention.
As an aside, this phobia was even more extreme with respect to our favorite winter vacation spot–a tiny island in the Caribbean that was, in good weather, hours by boat away from the nearest thing that had an even passing resemblance to an emergency room. Before we visited for the first time, I didn’t know how remote it was, but by the time we were docking at the island (and I’d been feeling that we were getting farther and farther off the map with each passing hour) I was more than a little bit worried. “What if one of us steps on a scorpionfish? What’ll we do then?” I asked my wife. “Don’t worry; they’re rare, and shy. The odds of even seeing one are negligible.” I put it out of my mind, and ten minutes after we arrived, I was wading in the water off the beach, fiddling with my snorkel gear. I put the mask on my face, and bent down so that it was in the water. The water was perfectly clear, and I could see a huge school of brightly-colored fish swimming around me. They were so beautiful and mesmerizing that it took at least a minute before I noticed the scorpionfish six inches from my left foot. We have no immediate plans to vacation there with our children.
So, the genesis of these characters is the story that follows below; a daydream that sprang from my phobia of what might happen if one of my children was in desperate, unanticipated need of medical care, coupled with a huge amount of wishful thinking and reading far too many science fiction novels as a kid.
Not very exciting, I’m afraid, and the story is sort of a clunker, but hey, this is my blog. I don’t have to convince a publisher that people will pay to read it, or even that’s it’s a good story.
Nevertheless, I hope you’ll enjoy it, as I slowly cut and paste it here, after making an editing pass or two over it.
