Guest Blog: Richard Wright, author of Hiram Grange & The Nymphs of Krakow

Hello there. Richard Wright here,trading blogs with Kevin for the day. For those who don't know,I'm the author of the book following Kevin's in the Hiram Grangeseries – Hiram Grange and the Nymphs of Krakow . I thought Imight waffle on a bit, in a quite random and wandering fashion, onhow characters are birthed.
The tale of how Hiram was born shouldbe familiar to most readers here. From Timothy Deal's first, loosecharacter outline, through an eighteen month or so developmentprocess in which five writers tossed ideas around, crushing some,saving others, and developing the final character before each writingan entry in the first series of his adventures, it's a welldocumented process.
What we've rarely gone into is thebreath of life moment. After our extensive brainstorming sessions,during which emails would fly about often faster than you could keepup with reading them, we weren't left with a living,breathing, character who could bestride our individual tales. Whatwe had was a list. Items owned. Personality traits. Bits of agreedupon history. Named acquaintances. Bad habits (quite a long list,this one). What none of us had yet done was sew the parts together,and breathe life into the man.
It's not something that you can do asa team. It's something very personal, very unique to each author. It happens when fingers are hitting keys, and the character starts toinhabit you, speak through you. That's how it works for me,anyway, and I can only document it retrospectively. At the time,it's too furious a chain reaction to break down.
Hiram was an especially swift birth. He got into my head as soon as I started to write his world down,longhand, in a lined, moleskin notebook. I set things up to maximisethe chance of this happening. The opening section is actually thevery end of an unseen previous adventure based somewhere betweenKevin's Chosen One and my own Nymphs of Krakow. Frompage one events are moving fast, and the pressure is on for Hiram. This helped in pinning his essence down – by immediately findingout where his break points were, what decisions he made when underextraordinary stress, I was already turning those lists of words intoreactions within context, and that's where people reallydemonstrate themselves, in art just as in life.
I kept the pressure on the characterfrom those first moments, quickly moving him out of his comfort zoneand thrusting him into a new environment, the city of Krakow. Hegets barely a moment to rest from the first page to the last, and isconstantly tested. Part of this was dramatic, a function of story. On the other hand, after so many months work creating him, I waseager to road test him as brutally as I could. I may never getanother chance to pen a full length Hiram tale (this will be decidedon a very practical basis in the end, depending solely on theappetite for the character), so it was important to me that I writeas though it was the last time I would get to play with him. Wecreated Hiram so that we could grind him through the mill, and I hopeI did just that.
As well as the exhausting physicalityof the stress Hiram is put under, I established very early on in thedevelopment of the series that I wanted to pull his world apart inthe last book. Hiram, as you'll know if you've dipped your toeinto one of the five books he now features in, is a mess ofinsecurities and addictions, a man who barely functions as a normalhuman being. What holds him together, and brings him back from thebrink more than once, is his mission. For all his flaws, he defendspeople from dark, shrieking things on the edge of reality. Loathsomethough he may occasionally be, he is validated by the honesty andvalue of his purpose.
What if I could take that purpose away,or at least undermine his faith in it? How would he answer tohimself, without his get-out-of-jail-free mission? That'sthe real pressure I applied to the character through the book, notbecause I wanted a definitive answer, but to find those preciousbreak points. It was the most enjoyable part of writing the book. Sex, booze, rooftop chases and werebats are all very well, butthey're so much more fun to write when your character is reelingwith uncertainty and doubt.
The question of his reality, andwhether any of what Hiram believes has merit, also helped to dealwith hearing his voice and needs in my head. We devised Hiram to beflawed. More than that, we devised him to be pitiable and horrific. He's an anti-hero in a true sense. You don't ever want to spendintimate time with this man, yet as his author, my job was to do justthat.
To write a character like Hiram, youdon't have to be him. However, you do have to empathisewith him, which can leave a bad taste in the mouth when he's athis lowest. Yet, the worst thing that any of we writers could havedone would have been to judge him. Hiram's love/hate relationshipwith himself is very different from the rest of the world's, and inunderstanding that you're halfway to being able to write him. Ifyou can write him empathically, feeling your way through how hishopeless addictions grow organically from his life, then you're therest of the way to allowing readers to love him despite his flaws. We had to open the door to let you do that.
I hope it worked, I really do. I hopeHiram Grange has lodged in your brain, taking some small place in thepantheon of fictional characters you've enjoyed, and might one dayenjoy again. If you can feel him breathing, we might just havemanaged it.
Sorry about that.
Richard Wright is an author of strange dark fictions, currently living with his wife and daughter in New Delhi, India. His stories have been widely published in the United Kingdom and USA for over a decade, most recently in magazines and anthologies including Dark Wisdom, Withersin 3.2, Beneath the Surface, Shroud, Tattered Souls, Choices, Dark Faith, the Doctor Who collection Short Trips: Re:Collections, and the Iris Wildthyme anthology Iris: Abroad. When not tiger hunting or snake wrangling, he wonders what Hiram might make of India, and hopes to one day find out.