Paper People by Janie DeVos

 

Peterson Park administration building today, which once housed the autopsy rooms and morgue at the Chicago Municipal Tuberculosis Sanatorium

      The WordWranglers’ theme for this month is writing about something we’re working on.  As a subtopic of such, I thought I’d write about the people behind some of my characters in stories I’ve written about, or are working on now.  

Many times, a character just pops into my mind and there is no one living or deceased who has inspired the birth of my fictional one.  I might have a clear idea of the topic I’d like to write about when a character appears in my mind’s eye who becomes the hero or heroine, or any of a multitude of characters in my story.  However, there are those characters who have been inspired by someone I’ve known or know, and some of them may have been nothing more than a passing acquaintance. 

Take, for instance, Striker, in THE RISING OF GLORY LAND.  For some odd reason, an old friend’s soft-spoken, academic, surfer boyfriend, George, popped up in my memory, and that tall, blonde, highly intelligent beach boy from my high school days morphed into Striker.  He was the perfect balance to my heroine; the fiery dark-haired Eliza, and while I could clearly see her in my mind’s eye and felt that I understood her inside and out, no one in my repertoire of known people past or present was the inspiration for her. 

My maternal grandmother, Nell, was definitely the inspiration for Lily, in THE RIVER TO GLORY LAND.   Like Lily, my grandmother was a flapper in Miami, FL, in the 1920’s, and was as courageously tenacious and strongly determined as her fictional version was.  My grandmother did win a Charleston dance contest at the Rooney Hotel, on Miami Beach in the ‘20s, and she also lived to tell about the monstrous hurricane that roared ashore in 1926, with winds of 150+ mph.  In the middle of the night, her home’s roof was torn off, forcing her and other family members, (including small children) to hang on to avocado and mango trees in order to make it to the safety of their neighbor’s house next door.  Just like in the book. 

In THE ART OF BREATHING, my paternal grandmother, Kathryn Sandell, was my heartbreaking muse.  As I’ve written about in earlier blogs, a fictional version of her was the woman in my novel who suffered from Tuberculosis in the 1950’s, in North Carolina.  Researching for that novel was one of the most interesting, yet saddest, projects I’ve ever worked on.  My husband and I actually went to the sanatorium in Chicago where she died in 1938.  The massive old sanatorium complex is now a series of small parks, and the buildings that once housed the patients, as well as the morgue, a sputum sample lab and dispensary, and various other hospital buildings, have been recycled into properties that are used for much happier purposes.  In one of today’s parks’ administration buildings  was the old morgue, and we actually were given an in-depth tour of it; including the attic that was like a time capsule, complete with patients’ records, as well as small mason-style jars that held lung tissue samples from hundreds of patients’ autopsies.  As I said, it was fascinating, but also morbidly sad, however, it did give me what I needed in order to write a book that was not only accurately correct, but also one that had the emotional intensity I wanted in it.   

Presently, I’m working on WEDNESDAYS AT THE WABASH DINER, and the father of my heroine was born out of the memory of a man who lived in my neighborhood when I was a kid.  He was a short, stocky, fiery Scotsman, with auburn hair and bright blue eyes, who loved a good, long pull on a bottle of something hard.  When his nose was a bright red and he slurred his words, we knew to give him a little space. 

Also, in “WEDNESDAYS” is a character named Eugene.  This young man is mentally challenged, as well as being so perfectly handsome that he’s almost pretty.  Eugene reminds me of a boy I went to school with who was more highly functional than my fictional version, but still had a learning disability.  But, because the real life “Eugene” was massively built, and understood the concepts and rules of football quite well, he was able to make the team.  As a result, he was liked and accepted, instead of feeling the terrible sting of rejection. 

Whether or not my characters have a muse makes very little difference in the way I feel about them.  Through the pages, they all come alive for me, and when I’m done writing each novel, I feel a sense of loss and I truly miss them.  The character I felt that way about the most was Max Harjo, in A CORNER IN GLORY LAND.  Though my character wasn’t inspired by anyone dead or alive, I still felt as if I understood him completely.  I can’t tell you exactly why, but I did, and when I wrote “The End” on the very last page of that book, I was down in the dumps, as if one of my best friends had moved far away. 

Without a doubt, I become very emotionally connected to my fictional characters, and, because of that, they continue to live on in the feelings they evoked in me and in my memories of them.  In the end, they may not be anything more than “paper people”, but, for me, they’ll forever be loved like close friends and family, almost as much as the flesh and blood kind.