Guest blogger- Michael Simon

I hope everyone's holiday was wonderful! Today, we have author, Michael Simon dropping in. Michael is the author of four novels, the latest being The Last Jew Standing. Visit his site at http://www.michaelsimon.info/.

Living with Your Main Character
By Michael Simon

As the fourth of my Dan Reles novels gets launched into the universe, I think back on how Dan came into my life. I was a struggling New York playwright, hoping to buy fame, fortune, and more important, immortality, by writing a crime thriller. I had no trouble finding secondary characters for the book, villains and colleagues often modeled on my co-workers in the probation office in Austin. Neighbors and stoolies and girlfriends.

But a main character is harder. He has to be vivid, and also three-dimensional. Distinct, but dynamic, changeable.

For many of the supporting characters, I had an image in mind, often a real-life acquaintance, just as often an actor, a face and a voice onto which I could graft a personality of my own creation. (Torbett was played in my mind by the actor Joe Morton.)

But the main character was harder. I knew he’d be with me all the time, for years.

So I started with the old acting technique, the magic “if.” To get to the character, I imagined what I would be like, if I were living under his circumstances.

To start, I’d be about three inches taller, an even six feet. I’d have broad shoulders, and an extra seventy pounds of muscle. Instead of being stooped with the posture of someone who spends his life in front of a computer, I’d be stooped with a boxer’s musculature. And I could punch. And I’d have the power of arrest. And a gun.

Dan’s mother left when he was ten, leaving him in the care of his emotionally distant ex-con father. So I’d be tough, jaded, and damaged.

An image came to mind, far enough from me that I could see him. A cross between, say, Nicolas Cage and Adrian Brodie. He developed a speech rhythm. He became real.

He lived in my brain for nine years.

Michael was also my guest at You Don't Know Jack blog and radio show. Visit: www.youdontknowjack.blogsavy.com and www.blogtalkradio.com/sydneymolare to read and listen to more Michael.