Meet Lars Walker

*I “met” Lars Walker on line about 8 years ago, when it seemed that we’d both been sidelined forever by the establishment.  We took different strategies to reviving our career with different results (to be honest my strategy might only have worked for a semi-hysterical compulsive writer with a typing speed fo 220 words a minute.)  But now, as these things go, the field has changed and our strategies are converging.  Kindly welcome Lars Walker who wishes to speak to you about his indie book.*

When I set out to write my latest novel, Troll Valley, I raised my umbrella (metaphorically speaking) in a lightning storm.

I’d made up my mind, putting it bluntly, to write a semiautobiographical novel.

Now before you make a note never to go near Troll Valley ($2.99 on Amazon for the Kindle, Nook available for the same price at lulu.com) let me hasten to add that the main character’s life isn’t actually much like mine at all. For one thing, he (his name is Chris Anderson) was born about 40 years before I was. The facts of his life are different, but he thinks and feels like me.

For instance.

Today I took my snow blower to the shop for repairs. Actually, I’d been trying to take it in for three days. The first day, they were closed. The second day they closed the office one hour before the closing time I’d been given (I got there about three minutes too late and stood mouthing bad words in the cold). Today I planned to leave work a little early, to make sure I got there in plenty of time. Instead I got stuck in an interminable meeting. But I managed to make it in under the wire, and to persuade the friendly service professionals that I was worthy to give them my money.

I’m a fairly petty man, and I let petty things bother me. With each disappointment, I felt a growing conviction that the universe was confounding me, that God was yanking my chain. (If we have a heavy snow before I get the machine back, I may become mad, bad, and dangerous to know).

Now this is always a stupid attitude, but it’s especially stupid in an author. Because we, of all people, know—from experience in constructing plots—that obstacles and setbacks are not given to us to frustrate us, but in order to raise the stakes and make our final resolutions more significant and satisfying.

Chris Anderson’s weakness as a main character in Troll Valley is precisely that he’s like me. He’s not a born fighter. He faces every challenge with the conviction that he’s already lost.

Any author will tell you that that’s a terrible design for a character. Pick up any beginner’s book on writing fiction and you’ll read that you have to create a main character who’s plucky, who never gives up.

This is consistent with the essential nature of Story (which I believe to be a moral exercise). Stories are accounts of people facing adversity, trying to fix it, failing, and trying again and again— in fact making things worse— until a) they overcome and achieve victory, or b) they fail in some significant way.

But what if the obstacle (as in Chris’s case) is the character’s own cowardice? What if the only thing he has to fear is, in fact, fear itself?

I think there’s a story there too.

I think I can create a character who learns to handle problems better than I actually have in my real life.

Here’s a secret. You don’t have to be as good as your characters. Show me an author, I’ll show you a hypocrite. We all know stories of writers of romances whose relationships are like a series of arson fires. We know of adventure writers who rarely leave the house. We even know of science fiction writers who flunked physics.

Faking it is OK.

In fact, faking it is what we do.

That’s why it’s called fiction.