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The Case of the Stalled Story
Mysterious Shadows
Whodunnit?
From my 10th floor perch in Chicago, I look out over the treetops of Lincoln Park to Lake Michigan. On the horizon, a tanker inches along—miles away, unidentifiable. A mysterious shadow moving south. Toward Chicago? Gary, Indiana?
With one app, I could solve the mystery in seconds: port of origin, destination, speed, even archival photos. Mystery solved, case closed.
Not so easy for a mystery writer, who still has to figure out how to turn the tables and bring a story to an end.
Today, I finally saw how that moment would happen. Relief washed over me. For once, I feel certain I can finish this draft of Lens of Suspicion (working title). That’s a big deal.
My process has always been hamstrung by the one-step-forward, two-steps-back syndrome: monkeying endlessly with sentences I’ve already written, while avoiding the terrifying business of moving forward. But today’s different. Today, I can see the end.
Now all that’s left is to get there.
Thank you for taking the time to get to the end. If you would like to join the Chicago Writers Circle on Zoom for our daily morning sprint, hop on.
All are welcome. We’re there daily at 9 am CST, 365 days a year. Link to the Meetup.
Dee Majors: Amateur Sleuth
The Making of a Character
It’s been a minute since I’ve added a blogpost on this site, but yesterday I went wild and posted on Substack and crosspost it here for those who do not follow me on Substack.
Years ago, I bought a domain name: IndelibleCharacters.com. I wasn’t sure what I wanted it to become, only that the phrase captured something I felt I needed to explore: actual and fictional stories with characters who stay with you long after you’ve read the last page or decades later after you’ve moved away from them. But alas, I never published even one page, and I stopped paying to hold the name. Today I decided it’s time to start bringing that initial idea back to life in this Substack and give it a twist toward the process of creating fictional characters and treat it as a kind of laboratory for me to create and grow characters for my own fiction writing.
Why Focus on Characters Rather than Plot?
Currently, I’m writing thriller and mystery stories where plot is of paramount concern, but no matter how clever a plot may be, we only remember a story if we remember the people in it. A character doesn’t become indelible because the author describes them perfectly—the color of their eyes, the bounce in their walk, the tenor of their voice. They stick because they feel true—as if we’ve met them before, or might meet them tomorrow.
The Actor’s Lens (Backwards)
My background is theater, though I never fancied myself a playwright, I loved directing, have devised work for the stage, created puppets and masks, designed sets and uncomfortably have gotten under the lights to do a wee bit of stage acting. Although I’ve long abandoned my theater work, I find that what I learned in that medium has application to creating narrative fiction. Here’s my working theory: writers and actors are solving opposite problems.
- Actors are given dialogue and stage directions. Their job is to uncover the subtext—those hidden motivations, fears, and longings that make the lines playable.
- Writers, by contrast, start with a blank page. We have to create the subtext before we can even write the lines. That means pulling from our own lived experiences, emotions, and memories, then reshaping them inside fictional circumstances.
I think of it as “backwards acting.” Actors dig down into the text to find the truth. Writers dig into the truth to generate text.
What You’ll Find Here
This space will be a mix of:
- Craft insights — posts about shame, longing, projection, and other inner forces that drive characterization.
- Process notes — real-time reflections on how I build characters in my current fiction projects.
- What-if exercises — mashups that take real people from my life and reimagine them in unexpected roles. (Example: What if my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. VanPelt, was the hostess at a strip club?)
Why Write It Publicly?
Because writing fiction is private, often solitary work—but character is universal. Every writer wrestles with the same problem: how do I make this person on the page matter? Documenting my experiments, struggles, and occasional breakthroughs might help me—and maybe help you too.
An Invitation
If you’ve ever wondered how to take a person from memory and transform them into someone unforgettable on the page, welcome. That’s the journey I’m on. Let’s see what we can discover together.
The Laboratory: Dee Majors, amateur sleuth
Currently, I’m crafting a not-so-cozy murder mystery set in a fictionalized version of my hometown. My amateur sleuth is a seventy-something ex-lounge singer who suspects her past-sell-date neighbor did not die in her sleep of natural causes but was murdered to keep her quiet about a crime she witnessed. Part of what has been holding me back from finishing the first story in my planned series of interconnected short mysteries is the fear of not setting up the series in a way that it can organically grow and thrive. I started asking myself: How can I develop my protagonist to work not only for this story, but to be rich enough to carry through the collection?
I reached for a writers’ craft book on my shelf and found an article by Sara Paretsky, a Chicago icon of detective fiction. She gave me some sage advice in her article, “Writing a Series Character,” and taught me how to think about it. She pointed out with examples that solving the crime is only the resolution to the individual story. But in a series, the greater problem does not resolve until the end of the series, when the protagonist closes the unfinished business that drove her to pursue her investigative work.
I asked myself: Why would Dee Majors take on the job of solving a crime, especially one that may not even be a crime? I had already decided she grew up in the shadows of a business her father ran, a lively lounge in the town. The upstanding townsfolk had always suspected him of being connected in some way to the Mob. Small towns have long memories, and their jaded opinion of Dee’s family ties had colored her ability to be fully accepted in the local social circles. Now retired with time on her hands, Dee wants acceptance and feels she has something to prove. If she can solve the murder, maybe she can show the community she has something to contribute.
That hasn’t felt like it is enough. So, I look toward the Story Grid. As a member of the Story Grid Guild, I follow Shawn Coyne who urges us to find the personal in our writing and connect to that to find the Truth in our fiction. A small-t truth is something like grass is green. Capital-T truth is more difficult to quantify. It’s more like how something we’ve experienced feels, and that’s what we have to bring to the characters who inhabit the settings we put on the page. That’s what makes fiction come alive and resonate with the reader.
My family owned a small-town bakery on the Jersey Shore, and when I turned 21, my father took me on an odd journey one night. We worked our way down the shore from bar to bar, where he seemed to be a known and respected patron. I went with the flow and gabbed with folks he introduced me to. It wasn’t until the end of the evening when we got home that I understood what had been on his mind. He said, “Never go back to those bars and do not socialize with any of the people we met.” None had been my type, but I asked anyway, “Why, Daddy?” His response was a stern and heartfelt bit of advice. “They are dangerous people, gangsters, and if you are around any one of them when something goes down, your life will be in danger. Stay away, so you do not see anything you shouldn’t see.” My emotional response to that was confusion about why my father would think that was my beat and I would enjoy such company. Then I asked why he seemed so buddy-buddy with that crowd. He explained. “It’s the cost of doing business. If I want flour and sugar delivered on time, I have to pay the Mob.” What if I put Dee in my shoes? Will it add some intrigue and complexity to her backstory? What if that shady gangster life was part of Dee’s upbringing? What if the young Dee had witnessed something going down in her father’s lounge and had been called to testify against the Mob? These are conditions I can bring to my character’s background. Her father would have pressured her to cover up for the Mob to save both their lives.
Today, I decided that teenage Dee witnessed some shady business between low-level mobsters who were an inconvenient part of her father doing business in a mid-century New Jersey town where the Mob controled the trucking industry that delivered supplies. At some point in her young adult life, the court subpoenaed her to testify against one of those mobsters. Instead of telling the truth, Dee doubled down on her father’s advice to keep quiet. The mobsters went free, and she suffered ostracism because the townsfolk knew she lied. She never got over the shame of refusing to contribute to the cause of justice, and the townsfolk never forgot what she did.
Now I have a redemption story arc that will carry my mystery series. Dee wants to serve justice to prove she is worthy of being accepted.
Character Business
“You’re in the business of creating characters,” a workshop leader at a writing conference once said. I agree I am. No, I’m not an actor, though I have a background in theater and played a few roles on the stage. That was stage one of my growth as a person, no pun intended. Stage one was the first twenty-four years of my adult life when I defined myself as an artist until I went down the rabbit hole of graduate school earning a Ph.D. and I called myself a scholar who studies performance. Stage two, public school teacher, spanned nearly two decades. Now solidly in the sixth year of stage three of this wonderful gift called life, I define myself as a fiction writer. So, yes indeed, I am in the business of creating characters.
Where do these characters come from? As a child, I hated fiction. “Tell me a real story,” I’d say to my mother at bedtime, so she enthralled me with tales of growing up on the Jersey Shore at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her adventures were far more interesting than those in the Little Golden Books of my childhood.
Through her stories, I encountered a number of intriguing characters, some I even met when I got older. Those were the indelible ones. Their stories were my secrets. I didn’t reveal what my mother had told me about their lives and how she had been touched by them, how she had grown stronger because of them or was deeply hurt and damaged by what they had done.
They were about real people. Where do fictional characters come from? They come from the only place possible, the writer’s imagination, which is nourished by life experience. I have met a lot of characters in my life, far too many to include in my fiction writing. That’s why I’m starting a new blog called Indelible Characters, where I will post vignettes inspired by people I have encountered. I may also cross-post them here so I can periodically breathe life into this portal until a revision of Eat Your Warrior Fish, my debut YA novel, is ready to launch.
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Orbiting Jupiter, a review
This page-turner bridges middle-grade and young adult. In his short novel published in 2017, Newberry award-winning author professor at Calvin Collge in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Gary D. Schmidt, has created two compelling young protagonists—fourteen-year-old Joseph Brook and twelve-year-old Jack Hurd. I say Orbiting Jupiter bridges these two audiences, not because of the spread in the boys’ ages, but because of the complexities and mature content that would easily appeal to high school and also adult readers, despite the young ages of the main characters. This is a story of acceptance, family values, perseverance, and second chances.
Joseph Brook is an eighth-grader who by the age of thirteen has already fathered a child. He moves in with the Hurd family when they benevolently agree to take on Joseph as a foster child with all the ramifications of this youngster’s past. That means their only-child Jack will finally have a companion and have someone with whom to share the chores around their Maine farm. Jack is only a sixth-grader and Joseph is not exactly ready to slip into the role of a brother because he comes with a lot of baggage that needs careful unpacking. He is consumed by his passion for reuniting with his precious daughter Jupiter whom he is forbidden to see.
The Hurd family takes Joseph under its wing and Jack goes out on a limb risking ridicule by his friends, some of whom target Joseph, bully him and start a fight. He also refuses to heed the warnings from some of the adults at school who caution him to steer clear of this troubled youth. Joseph is not totally ostracized, Coach Swieteck and the English teacher have faith in his abilities and support Joseph in catching up academically.
It’s no wonder this book stays at the top of Amazon’s charts. Readers of all ages will fall in love with this book and root the boys on as they figure out how to adjust to one another and navigate the perimeters of what is expected of them and what is the right thing to do. I don’t want to spoil it all for you, but the story does take a dark turn toward violence when we least expect it, but never in a gratuitous manner.
Readers will find that Schmidt is an accomplished writer who not only brings compassion to the difficulties these two boys grapple but also draws the parents as full charters unto themselves who are equally challenged by the events that impact their decisions. Animal lovers will thoroughly enjoy how tending to the farm animals and milking the cows is a vehicle for tapping into Joseph’s true self and acts as a vehicle for tempering his troubled soul.