FINDING MYSELF THROUGH WRITING, PART 1
Most people are aware that Art is one of the highest forms of self-expression. While the medium may differ, most artists feel and sense something about their lives and surroundings and then translate those sentiments into an artistic form.
Writers, musicians, artists and sculptors, spoken word artists, graphic designers, weavers — the list goes on and on. Whether it is words or tones and rhythms, brush strokes, any tool within the discipline, the ultimate goal is to express a thought, feeling, impulse, or emotion.
Certainly, there are writers who mass produce books or singers who come out with faint copies of their style to satisfy their fans. This is a product being created, a saleable item, a commodity. We need not begrudge those who do that. But I don’t look too hard for anything of great value within such works.
I believe I have always had a facility with words, whether verbal communication or business correspondence. It has taken a great effort throughout my sixty years to develop a sense of craft, to allow my output to have a reasonable value in terms of entertainment and acceptability.
Crime fiction came naturally to me. I have worked in customer service for a vast number of years and used the genre as a release from stress. But, also, there was the notion of delving into the mind of people, attempting in some fashion to determine why some people do bad things. It was largely a casual inquiry.
Over the last several years, I have made a conscious effort to imbue my works with more of a sense of, well, ME. The Ark City Confidential Chronicles series was meticulously researched. The main character developed and grew over the twenty-year span of the series. Eventually, it reached a natural conclusion.
It was 2019. I was finishing up on the last book in the series (“From Somewhere in a Dream”). My wife was away for the weekend. I was in the hot tub with a martini, consciously trying to discern the new character in the next series.
I knew I wanted him to be a Jew. I wanted to have more of a connection with him. I needed him to have a physical flaw as I felt that would identify his fallibility. So, if you’re working in the historical milieu, where does one obtain an impediment? World War II was the perfect time period.
However, I was intent on this being a private detective. Simply having an injured vet become a private detective did not seem reasonable enough. If he were a cop before the war, that would make a nice segue. But why wouldn’t he simply return to his former job?
This is where I was able to touch upon the moral, psychological, and existential dilemma for such a character. If his family had wanted him to be a rabbi, I could have a main character torn between the laws of man and the laws of God.
There it was. The characteristics I was looking for. Furthermore, I would be subverting the genre by ignoring most of the standard tropes. No cheap bottle of rye in a desk drawer. No heavy amount of smoking, rooms filled to the brim. No excessive gunplay.
The cases would primarily involve looking for missing people. It plays into the notion of a search for a person as well as a search for the truth. Old Testament and Talmudic scripture would be included because those were the moral guiding principles. His background as a policeman provided the legal sense of justice. The story lay in between.
And so, Harold Bergman was born. As I wrote of his cases in a new forthcoming book, I saw his dilemma through my eyes. While he was just short of 30 and I am now 60, it was almost like looking back at myself. Assuming I was a veteran and former policeman.
It is not the biographical details of his life that allow me to find more of myself while telling Harold’s tale. It is: being a Jew in a world that might not like or trust you; torn between wanting to get ahead and perhaps taking shortcuts or adhering to the moral principles under which you were raised, no matter how difficult; and accepting the need for a gun and acquiescing to violence or using intellect and logic to reason out a resolution.
NEXT: How understanding your characters helps you understand yourself
