Real Inspiration for Fictional Characters

     

     I have been asked if scenes or characters in The Revolutionists have been based on real people or things that actually took place. All fiction carries disclaimers, but the answer is, “Yes.” When I was 14, I had a friend named Lee who, tragically, was killed in a terrible boating accident. That was the first time something I had written was read in public. It was a poem about my friend. It was not very well written because I was 14 at the time, but it was written from the heart. They did not read my name, as I remember; they simply said a friend and classmate had written it and it was included in the eulogy. I was actually sitting in an adjacent room because of the crowd and couldn't hear very well, but I was glad they read it.
     Months before he died, Lee and I were at the YMCA in the lobby one day when we were approached by a local tough guy whose nickname was “Bugs.” Lee and I weighed about 130-140 pounds then, but Lee picked Bugs up over his head like a sack of potatoes and held him in the air. Bugs weighed well over 200 pounds. No, he didn't throw Bugs across the lobby, like Michael does in the beginning of the book, because they weren't fighting…just fooling around. Pound-for-pound, Lee was the strongest kid I ever knew. If he had lived I believe that he would have been the greatest natural athlete the town would ever produce. I still miss him.
The Old Man is my late father-in-law. Yes, his tank was hit by the Nazis, and he and one other man did survive. He loved hunting, but, at the end of his life he did say that his deer hunting days were over and that he simply wanted to look at them. Michael reminisces about him at the beginning of the book. He ran a dragline in the central Pennsylvania coal fields. His oiler told us once when we were on the “drag” with him that he was the best dragline operator in the whole area, maybe the whole state. He could make that massive machine dance without error. He did more to heat the homes of America than any puffed-up politician and all the hot air that has ever blown out of Washington.

     To write good fiction you have to have good models. My life is filled with such people. I've been truly blessed by having such incredible people in my life.
Make sure you get your copy of Revolutionists!