Technical Difficulties: "Quintessence"

I write better when I know my subject. It's problematic for fiction when you have to invent lives in order to make characters believable. It's easy to write down stereotypes, archetypes and ordinary types, but making characters deep and involving, well...involves you, setting up the landmarks of their lives and narrowing down pinpoint fuckin' details. Any idiot scrawler can describe a fast paced shooting sequence, but describing the moment where a character decides to take arms and change life around him forever is where the art of writing lies. It's where my interest is anyway.

In order to write believable and gut-wretching fiction like I am to, I have to anchor myself somewhere. Like reality for example. It's believable when you see it right? Let's come back to Charles again. He's a troubled kid. Somewhat of a firestarter too, but he's got a lot of positive energy, thanks to the Weavers and their watchful eye. I had a similar friend when I was young. Let's name him Scottie. He was the dreaded kid in my neighborhood. Watchful parents (including mine) didn't let you hang around with Scottie the mischief maker. I ended up getting along with him just fine, thanks to his strength of character and some strange life circumstances.

Scott was this huge blond kid with an unhealthy crave for attention. His father was an agronomist, always on the road and his mother had her hands full with his mildly handicapped sister so he was, more often than not, thrown in the world on his own. A little ill-equipped socially, Scottie got into many fighter, fell to bad influences and earned himself the title of "dreaded kid". I remember countless times my mother came to me and said: "Don't hang around with that Scottie kid, he's a bad seed".

It's the magic of juvenile athletics that made our paths cross each other. I was in the basket-ball team in high school. In my second year, Scottie wanted in at my position. He tried out and did very well. His big frame and his workhorse attitude made him a dominant player under the rim. I was a little pissed off at first because he bumped me from my starter position, but we quickly realized that he was a good fit in the team. With friends to finally back him up, he had the confidence to clear his name and stand up to every opportunist that came to him for an easy fight and an ego boost.

I remember this glorious week where we helped Scottie to fight twice in public and clean the clock out of two losers who called him out for a good reason. Scottie called them out to fight in the elementary school yard. There were supposed to be three fights, but one of the guys pussied out. The most memorable one was where this guy he barely known called him out one afternoon in front of his girlfriend. Scottie used to blow these guys away with a middle finger, but then he walked up to him and challenged him for the evening. That night, he took it to that guy and broke his nose. There were three right hands. First broke the nose, second twitched it in a funny angle and third one replaced it a little. That guy had to wear a bandage on his nose until the end of the school year where he graduated (he was older than my friend on top of it).

That infamous week worked wonders for his reputation. He went from trouble maker and firestarter to straight up gritty dude worthy of respect. Today he joined the army and last news I had of him, he had gained rank and was surprisingly high classed for a guy of his age (he's now 26). I should make Charles a little more like Scottie. I victimize the kid a little too much to my own taste. He's not Holden Caufield after all. He needs to undergo a transformation, or at least make his transformation apparent to the reader. More memories, less factual approach. A first person POV is a novel about an inner self. That's what I lack. Too much scrambling and not enough inner self. A walk in a graveyard life is a walk among memories, good and bad. The ghosts have to walk among the living. They can't only keep to nightmares and desperations. True ghosts are living with people, following their every steps.