Me and the Devil Blues: Creating and Meeting Your Favorite Persons

The old question runs, If you could go back in time and meet someone, who would it be? For me that's easy:  Robert Johnson. He was perhaps the greatest bluesman of all time and his influence on blues was decisive. Countless guitarists have imitated his chops and lead parts and copied his chord progressions. Keith Richards listened to Johnson; the influence gave the Rolling Stones their bluesy sound (as opposed to a regular pop sound). He stands as a giant among blues musicians. Too bad I really can’t meet him. Or can I?

Well, I can in a way. I can build a world he is in and I can enter it through the eyes of one of my characters. That’s what I did in my novella Strange Brew. It is a tale of a pop singer from the 1970s who meets up with a witch—a very powerful and very flipped-out witch. The old Cream song “Strange Brew,” says, “She’s a witch of trouble in electric blue / In her own mad mind, she’s in love with you. / With you! What are you gonna do?” The main character finds out you don’t brush off a powerful witch. He becomes her unwilling partner.

But he begins to see her soul. They travel time. They make love. He realizes that her magic cannot fix everything. To repair the damage she has done to her brain with drugs, the two of them travel back in time to meet up with the witch’s old lover, a HooDoo magician. They travel back to the USA in the 1920s. A local bluesman is playing the bars. Of course, it is none other than the main character’s guitar hero, Robert Johnson—and my guitar hero.

For these sequences, I get to at least imagine and, to a degree live, what it would have been like to hear Johnson play and to talk with him. The human imagination is the next best thing to being there.

The episode of going back in time also gave me a chance to portray the pre-segregation 

South—the society Johnson lived in and struggled in. I depict the racism, some of the violence, and the bigotry that reigned in 

those days. I also get a chance to show the community of people (black people and a few whites) who managed to navigate the waters of this time, to care for each other, to do good, enjoy themselves, and to produce some of the most amazing music ever done.

This is a perk fiction can give. It can enliven our imagination and provide the best access we will ever have to the past. Want to meet Benjamin Franklin? Helen of Troy? Jesus? The Goddess Aphrodite? Sergeant Alvin York? Create them as a character. It will bring you closer to them than you could ever imagine you might be.

And, of course, I would urge you to pick up a copy of Strange Brew. It is filled with music, magic, love . . . and an appearance by Robert Johnson.

Backstory

A new book by me has been released called The Prophetess, and it is an exercise in backstory.

Most of us know that backstory is character biography that we do not reveal. Most writers have come across advice to write a character biography. You should know all the biographical facts about your character. I know, for example, that my ongoing character, Sossity Chandler, was born in 1970 in Big Rapids, Michigan. She has blonde hair and grey eyes, started playing guitar when was thirteen because her father took her to a John Denver concert in Chicago and she wanted to play and sing as he did. I could go on and on with this and bore you. But this is character biography, which is a little different from backstory.

Backstory is what your character did, not what he or she is. Sossity, for example, speaks Spanish fluently. This is because the area she grew up in is home to a lot of migrant workers who have settled down. As a kid, she played with Spanish-speaking children and used her child-ability to pick up the language. At age fifteen, she moved to Grand Rapids, but did not want to lose her Spanish, so worked on it and went to Mexico as an exchange student, once for a summer, once for an entire year.

I often think up backstory about my character. I never write it. I fantasize about them, create imaginary situations they were in, think of how they would react to a current event, even create conversations they would have. This gives them depth and life even though those things will never actually appear in a text.

Once in church I heard a sermon from the New Testament that talked about a girl who was a fortune teller. The bible said she was possessed by a “pythoness” spirit.

This intrigued me. A pythoness spirit was what the Greeks called the spirit of prophecy the priestesses of Apollo were possessed with. At the temple of Apollo, the priestesses who were so possessed could give oracles that would tell the future. I wondered at this. The biblical text indicated the girl was only a young teenager. How does a fourteen year-old girl get possessed by a spirit? And if it is a pythoness spirit, why isn’t she living at the Temple of Apollo with all the other priestesses? Why is she a fortune teller living in a Roman city instead of a priestess?

Furthermore, the spirit speaks through her to say that Saint Paul is a servant of God who has come to show the way of salvation—which, as the story has it, is the truth. If it is a demon, and demons are evil, why is it telling the truth?

So I began to make up a backstory to explain all of this. The backstory became my new novella, The Prophetess.

We can create backstory for any character we sketch out, and we need to. Very often, it will become the material for creating a compelling narrative. And it’s as easy as fantasizing—something I do very well and find a lot more fun than writing a character biography.

 And consider getting a copy of the book, available now in Kindle.

Futher Activity as God: Creating Ongoing Characters

Creating characters is one more aspect of playing God. Giving characters an identity—their personality for certain but also the way they look, act, react, talk, make love, remember their past—is an intriguing adventure. Characters are often singular, but sometimes they are ongoing. They appear in multiple stories. This presents challenges and opportunities.

Some such characters are famous. Sherlock Holmes is possibly the most famous. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote 4 novellas and 56 short stories about his detective character. There are others too. W. Somerset Maugham had a character named Ashenden who appears in novels and short stories. Other mystery writers follow this, creating detectives or crime fighters about whom they pen dozens of stories. And, of course, there is James Bond. Ian Fleming wrote 14 novels and story collections about 007 (I read them all when I was in high school).

 My ongoing character is Sossity Chandler. I have published 35 stories about her. She is a rock and roll singer who struggles for many years before making it big. Some of the stories are about music and her career. But she occasionally meets ghosts and other paranormal manifestations.  She is up and down emotionally. When her marriage breaks apart, she has a “celebrity breakdown” and does some outrageous things. She is a come-back queen, though, and bounces or claws her upward after she is knocked down.

A continuing character creates opportunities and challenges.

Opportunities:  You get to know the character well. When a story idea arises, you immediately know how that character will act, how she (or he) will respond to the conflict. You also have figures you can bring into the story. An ongoing character has friends, advisers, children, maybe a spouse, all of whom are ongoing in their own right and, when a story requires their presence, you know how they will act as well.

You also get to develop the character and, as such, 

have the peculiar privilege of interacting with

her or him on a very intimate level. 

The late John Fowles, author of my favorite novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, once noted that characters originate from the same part of the brain we use to create the narrative by which we understand our own lives; as such, they are as real to us as we are to ourselves. I understand Sossity very well, and it is warming and satisfying  to deal with her when I write her stories.

Challenges:  You can get tired of an ongoing character. You can get bored with him or her. You’ve got to be careful, too, that you closely follow his biography and don’t mess up the details of her life from story to story. And sometimes you have to hurt your character. You don’t want to, but often doing so is a must for a story to succeed.

Consider creating an ongoing character. I may have more to say on this subject in the future.  And, if you want to read a little bit about Sossity Elisabeth Chandler from Big Rapids, Michigan, here are some links:

The Loss of Good

The Texas/Illinois Motel

Qualities of Light

Norwegian Wood

Bring in a Virgin . . .

In my novel The Sorceress of the Northern Seas, Terra is a ferocious young woman who sees her sister executed, sees her come back from the dead, assists Lybecca, the main character of the novel, in overcoming an evil sorceress named Guldutha and, as reward, is appointed queen of a large and spacious kingdom. She is eighteen years old and has never ruled a land, but she has Roman support. Terra is also a virgin, and this constitutes an important element in the tale.

In past ages, if you were a girl from the upper classes this was usually true of you. Girls from the lower classes had a chance to sneak off to the woods or out behind the barn, but if you were from the nobility or the wealthy citizens who wanted to climb the social ladder, your family kept close tabs on you. The nobility cared about blood lines. The wealthy citizenry who wanted to marry their daughters off knew noble families expected the bride to be chaste and pure.  And young women who were savvy and sharp also knew how to play this to their advantage.

Even with an arranged marriage, a young woman would have some influence with her parents. Who was going to get what she had to offer?  The man who was best looking, who could offer the largest dowry, who had land, good looks, and seemed like he would treat her well. Her condition of chastity made her powerful. It was a chip she could play in the card game of status, power, influence, and place.

Once she is crowned queen, Terra is immediately set upon by suitors. Not knowing what to do, she hits on a brilliant plan and publically declares that she will entertain no suitors for the next five years. She will remain a virgin and cloister herself away from men so she can rule without distraction. At the end of that time, she will decide whether she wants to marry or make it permanent.

Her reasoning on the matter:  On the one hand, virgins are considered naïve because they are uninitiated to the mysteries of sex, childbearing, intimacy with men, and the management of a household. On the other hand, when a virgin woman is secure and confident, she can evoke a kind of awe. I had seen this in the way people treated Sky when she was a priestess and in how worshippers regarded the senior priestesses and the abbess of her order. They showed deference and respect that amounted almost to fear.

This facet of her characterization lends intrigue to the plot. Will she marry? Will anyone dare approach her? How will the kingdom react to her choice? How will she function as queen now that she has freed herself from the distractions of marital negotiations? Was her decision wise or foolish?

So don’t be afraid to bring a virgin on board. They make fascinating characters.

Distributing Godesses and Other Deities in The Sorceress of the Northern Seas

The religious world I created for my novel The Sorceress of the Northern Seas was mix and match. It takes place on Earth, in, say about 400—but if you’re God you can alter the world as you see fit, and I did. The religions got shuffled around too.

 

First off is Christianity, which was starting to really catch on at that time. In the village Lybecca, the main character, hails from there is a church, but most of the people in the settlement still worship Eostre. Lybecca does as well. Her boyfriend, Ander, doesn’t have much time for religion.

 The ancient Britons—the Anglo-Saxons and the remnant of the Celts—worshiped her. She was a goddess of dawn and of fertility. Her symbols were the bunnies that appear when the earth begins to warm with spring, and eggs, which were symbols of birth and fertility. The ancient people used to paint them. They celebrated a holiday to their goddess in the spring called . . .  Eostre . . . sort of like Easter, isn’t it?

So this is one goddess who becomes widely worshipped in my book. In the section narrated by Terra, we meet her mentor, Amelia, who is a priestess of Eostre. Terra, though, is a worshiper of Ardwinna.

 We don’t know a lot about Ardwinna other than she was a Celtic goddess and associated with animals. No problem we don’t know a lot about her. In fact, as the Dutch say, Um zo besser. So much the better! That gives us a lot of space to fill in. I’ve used Ardwinna in several stories. In my book, she a widely worshiped chaste goddess, a little like Artemis, but not a huntress. Her priestesses take vows of virginity (Terra’s sister Sky gets into trouble when she violates this vow). Ardwinna is kind, equitable—unlike her sister, Morrigan, who is her opposite.

I notice that I like goddesses better than gods. Hmmm. Maybe need to get a few gods in volume two of the novel. 

Hecate, goddess of witches, makes an appearance in the novel. Other deities as well. In Star Wars film number three, 3CPO says “It is not in my programming to impersonate a deity.” It is in mine and in yours as well. Do a little research. There are a lot of fascinating pantheons out there. Shop around. Pick and choose and come up with your own pantheon for your fantasy and sci-fi worlds.

 Check out the various deities. Pick up a copy of The Sorceress of the Northern Seas.