Strangers To The Ground

I haven't written much about the writing process...or, to be more precise, my writing process, but I feel inclined to do so this evening. I'm going to settle in with a glass of wine, cool barely-breeze from my window gently moving the dog-eared cover of an FAA flight publication on my computer desk...and tell you about the novel I am working on.

No, actually, I'm going to tell you about the characters in that novel, whom I am slowly getting to know.

I am not getting to know them in the way I would like to, from the beginning to the end of their stories. From a creative standpoint, it would be easier if I did, but they don't seem to want it that way.

In January, Lew started waking me up in the middle of the night. He'd sit on my dresser and slowly tell me his secrets without volunteering anything. He'd only answer questions, which is odd, since as a young man, he was playful and vibrant and gregarious. Lew was an overgown boy until he went to war in the summer of 1940, and when he came home in the fall of 1944, I think the boyhood was all out of him. He admitted to me that he'd gone off to England to escape the things of his life that threatened to make him grow up, though by then he was nearly 25. It took months of quiet talks in the small hours of the morning for him to trust me with the deepest of his truths. When I finally got it out of him, when I finally asked the right questions, he stopped waking me up. It was as though he needed some time to process things himself. Just last week, he got into my car at an intersection and we chatted for a while about his life after the war. Lew was a fascinating man.

Lew's grandson Leo has been almost as hard to get to know. Leo's been too busy to talk much, and all I knew of him until recently was that he'd grown up loving airplanes, and one airplane in particular: a British fighter plane from World War II called the Spitfire. He'd learned as a boy that Lew flew them in the war, and that connection was all he needed to dream of Spitfires his entire life. Lew died before Leo was born, but legends of Spitfire pilots filled the place in his heart that a boy usually reserves for a grandfather...instead of fishing, Leo and Lew shared flying. As Leo grew up, he also learned to fly.

Leo tells me that having an imaginary hero for a grandfather can go a long way to making a young man into a romantic. By the time Leo was my age, he was making his own journey to England...to realize his dream to buy and restore a Spitfire.

I have only briefly met the women they loved. Gwendolyn grew up in Wales, and met Lew because they were posted to the same base. She, too, has been quiet about her experiences during and after the war...but I am patient, and I know she'll come around.

Gillian is...well...a mechanic. Not just any mechanic, Gillian is an artist, making airplane engines from parts that haven't existed for twenty years. She is quiet, studious, and brilliant, and like Gwen, I know she'll come around for a chat sooner or later. Gillian is the type who'll stay busy doing her own thing until she sees what I'm writing and then she'll drop by to set the record straight.

By now, I'm sure you're wondering if I've gone insane. It's possible. For me, though, the process of writing isn't mechanical or programmed; it doesn't fit into the simple boxes my various writing teachers have described over the years. I seldom outline, and when I do, it's never on a piece of paper or in a file in the computer. I get to know my characters and let them find their own voices.

And then I listen while they tell their stories.

So, is Leo really just me, or me as I'd like to be? Absolutely...so is Lew, and Gwen, and Gillian. They're all me-and-not-me. Lew, for example, is a drunk, which is decidedly not me. That particular trait comes from William Powell's Nick Charles, who for at least four of the six Thin Man films was an enthusiastic and erudite lush, without ever being sloppy.

It occurs to me that the development of these characters in my own mind is part will and part intuition...I know where I want them to go, but they know how they'll get there, and the understanding of them comes from unexpected places.

However this turns out, I am enjoying these people. I don't care if they're real or not.