Question: What’s the common thread between a dorky tent-camp manager, a traffic cop, and a shark?
Answer: They’re all inspiration for characters in the new series I’m working on. They’re also all proof you should think carefully before inspiring a writer. People often get excited when they meet a writer–they love the idea of having a character based on their very own self and being made famous in fiction. But in my fiction at least, they’re more likely to be infamous!
Take the traffic cop, for example. I’ve known lots of great cops–I’m even related to a few. And in a general sort of way, these law enforcement officers will make it into my books. But, good guy characters quickly take on a life of their own and become a whole person in the book, seperate from the real-life person that was their jumping off point. Villains will change, too, but often don’t need to change as much. This is probably because the person that inspired the villain wasn’t someone I knew well and yet is someone I can readily associate a lot of emotion with.
Emotion is a writer’s best friend. And who doesn’t feel emotions of one kind or another when looking at this?
The emotion I feel is outrage, and I associate it with the cop who will be immortalized as one of my new villains. When I looked into my rearview mirror as he walked away, the emotion was strong.  I knew he had speculated my speed based on my having passed a slow moving trailer. He drove behind the trailer for awhile to see how fast it was going, then figured how fast I must have been going when I passed it. Except the trailer had slowed down and pulled half off the road when I passed it, asking me to pass, so the cop was wrong. And he didn’t care. He didn’t even pretend he’d actually clocked me going the speed he ‘wrote me down for.’ But outrage is a great emotion to pull from when developing a character, so I’m grateful to the cop for providing me such an easy building base for my next villain. He’ll make a good one.
I don’t have as much emotion to pull from when thinking of the tent-camp manager. For the sake of brevity, let’s just say that if an entire campground is bedding down for the night and the children are trying to sleep–after all, it was midnight–the manager really shouldn’t join the one rowdy group that won’t shut up and turn down the radio. Not the best thing for business. But, while he was thoughtless, and bumbling, he’ll only make rude-guy or henchmen status. As for the shark? He’s inspired a whole new race of shark-men hybrids that can come out of the water, and he’ll be immortalized as a truly scary cold-blooded killer with the desire to annihilate. I hope he doesn’t mind.
