I've never had any bones about borrowing from my own personal experience/angst when writing short fiction. I did it a lot when I was younger, and I continue to do so to a more limited extent nowadays, and I'll probably keep on doing it in one form or another depending on the kind of story I'm writing.
But now is the first time I've tried to write with someone else, namely my recently deceased dear friend Jay Tan, as a template, and I've been repeatedly surprised by how hard a task it is proving to be.
Oddly enough, it's not because I'm concerned he might look bad. No, my concern is that he might come across as a two-dimensional, namby-pamby goody-two shoes whose sole cause of misery in life is that the author (me) wants to pile a whole series of misfortunes on him. No, what I hope to do is to borrow a little bit from Shakespeare and create a character who very much shapes his own destiny, in that when things go wrong he has himself to blame and when things go right...well, it's because he did something right. I don't want someone who just gets buffeted about by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune because he's too nice a guy to do anything about it. To create such an insipid character out of such a wonderfully nuanced human being would be a supreme insult, almost as much as if I just made the guy a flat-out asshole.
Even though the character is only loosely based on Jay, and is so unlike him in many respects, (for example, he won't even talk like he did), I still find myself tortured by the thought of creating a pasteboard character one way or the other who doesn't deserve the fate I have in store for him at the end of the story (ah ah aaaahhh, you'll have to read it once it's done...talesfrommasutra.blogspot.com).
Consequently I've done the unthinkable; unable to fully fathom the depth's of Jay's mind, which is now lost to me for the rest of this lifetime, I've infused a little bit of my romantic history into the narrative...my frustrations, my angst.
The original 'inspired by' template now feels a tad tainted, or at the very least diluted, but from where I stand it felt like a necessary evil because I felt like I was up against a creative brick wall.
I'm eleven pages into what I envision to be about a hundred-plus-page novella which I plan to break up into smaller installments to be published online, and I have yet to introduce the other lead character. I can't spend too much time dawdling on this one guy or I'll shoot myself in the foot for sure.
The result, as sick as this may sound, currently feels like a Jay Tan-Jim Arroyo inspired hybrid, or our love child, for those of you whose minds are perpetually in the gutter.
In the end, I'm not trying to create a character that everyone will love because he's such a nice guy or that everyone will hate because he's such an asshole, but someone who people will be able to understand and relate to, no matter how good or bad his actions may be. If I get this across, then I will have honored Jay through this creation.
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