Shop Talk: On Character

Mulling over my approach to writing - with bonus features!

I want to talk about process a bit this week.

If there’s one compliment I’ll grant myself as a writer, it’s that I have something of a facility with character. This has been confirmed to me by outside sources of some taste and discernment, and so I feel no shame in claiming it here. Characters come easily and naturally to me, while some other aspects like plotting and story structure are much more difficult. In fact, I’m often happy to create a character and let them roam around in my head indefinitely until I find a suitable narrative home for them; as time goes on, I have in fact become all too comfortable with the idea of letting them stay in that state indefinitely.

This is most often how an idea begins for me – with a character or a set of characters. Sometimes it’s an image, but even that is usually centered on the person within it. In grad school the thought of a man standing alone in a dark field, unable to move closer to the people he could see on the distant horizon, eventually turned into a short about the anxiety of facing the afterlife. More recently, the germ of an idea for one of my MFA scripts started with the image of my maternal grandmother, who had recently passed away, sitting alone at a kitchen table in an old, crumbling house, drinking a cup of coffee and waiting. I didn’t know who or what for, and that’s where the work came into play. I’m honestly still kind of trying to figure it out, a full draft and a conferred degree later. I’m sometimes too polite to ask these characters what they’re doing too often, and that can be a problem.

For me writing is often a process of answering these questions, which is part of why it tends to happen so slowly. Another challenge I face is that the answer to the question is often so much less interesting than the question itself; for this reason, I’ve gravitated more towards dramatic forms that have embraced this sense of mystery and ambiguity. A constant tension that I’ve felt throughout my career as a writer and filmmaker is that these particular forms are not necessarily all that popular or commercial; I’ve come to terms with that, and yet the influence is still exerted by some of my more steadfast readers who, even when they have my best interests at heart, nonetheless try to pull things in a direction I’m simply not interested in.

I’ve always been interested in people, and in addition to creating characters of my own I often think and daydream about people I encounter in real life who for whatever reason make a distinct impression. I still carry an image in my head of being an L Train in Chicago late at night, riding back to the hotel room I was sharing with my brother and a close friend during our attendance of Wizard World Chicago (what a different life that was!), of an older man in dirty work clothes and a jacket napping against the window across the aisle. His head was resting on his hand, which was propped on the sill of the window, and even though he had managed to get to sleep he seemed uncomfortable. Ill at ease. The idea that grew out of this was about a man falling asleep on his way home and waking up at the end of the line in a place completely unfamiliar to him who then had to try to find his way back without the immediate means to do so. This was 2005 – pre-smart phones and pre-Uber, both of which were advancements that would render this idea unusable or at the very least in dire need of some updates.

Years later I would read about an international film whose story followed a woman trying to make her way home through an unfamiliar part of town over the course of a single night after missing the last bus¹. I realized a couple things upon hearing about this: I had perhaps missed my chance, and also maybe I shouldn’t pay as much fealty to those well-meaning influences who insisted that my loglines weren’t dynamic or interesting enough. I know very few people hear about a story like that and get excited, but if I do then others must as well².

It's interesting then that, when teaching, I tend to breeze over character somewhat while dedicating much more granular attention to structure and plotting – to the extent that I feel as if I’ve become much better at teaching the things I’m less naturally adept at than those that come more easily. I think this makes perfect sense though - the difficulty in teaching a skill is that to a large extent they are based on developing a pre-existing natural talent. Of course what this also demonstrates is the necessity of working at a craft, of keying into and either developing your natural weaknesses or developing an overall approach that shifts that focus in a way that still feels appropriate. I also think it’s because I am in a sense trying to teach myself through my instruction of others.

There’s more I can (and will) say about story and plotting in the future, but what I want to offer now is a document I wrote some years ago for a film that I was helping develop as a student. The overall conceit was that it would be an anthology short film in which three different filmmakers would each craft a brief episode, all based on a night in the life of a single character. My job was to come up with that character. I decided that this was a perfect chance to set free a personage that had been trapped in my mind, unable to find a permanent home, for almost a decade. When I pitched this character, the idea was immediately embraced, and yet the difficulty then became communicating enough of the essential qualities of this person to three distinct artists in a way that they could then each approach guiding this person through not only their own scripts but through the performance of the actress who would be playing her in every segment.

The easiest way I could think of to do this was to write something. Writing for me is a process of discovery, which is why I find it so difficult to outline (remember when I said I tend to move very slowly?); sometimes I don’t know what I’m writing until I start writing it. But I also didn’t want to just type out a character bio because not only didn’t I think that would be particularly interesting, but it also didn’t feel true to my process or promise the best results for anyone else approaching the material. For me, it is essential that some elements of a character remain a mystery – through the writing, into the directing, even on into the editing stage. The process of writing is not just a process of discovery, it is an interrogation; it is a process of asking questions about a person or a situation, the material, and my relationship to it, and what I find so thrilling and rewarding about it is that you often either get different answers than you expected or sometimes you don’t get them at all. This is certainly unique to the way I write and the kinds of things I prefer to write, but some mystery must remain in order for something to resonate, if for no other reason than those lingering questions become questions to navigate with eventual collaborators in a way that further illuminates the material but also allows other creatives to bring their own insights into it, and also spur questions within the eventual audience that allow them to have an active and engaged experience that continues beyond the edges of whatever specific piece they’re interacting with.

And so below is what I settled on. I borrowed the last name from a high school classmate who I thought had a dynamic last name and who also, as I remembered it, had a fascination with blood and gore (it’s entirely possible that my memory has betrayed me here, or at the very least twisted some things around, but if it has then it’s simply one further example of the mystery and ambiguity that we must embrace as writers). I also utilized something of a self-insert – a document about a writer trying to get at the truth of a largely unknowable person that serves as an attempt to suggest potential truths for an unknowable character may be a bit on the nose, but it also felt completely right. I have resisted, with every ounce of strength, the urge to clean this up or make it more presentable or reflective of my current self, preferring to offer it exactly as it was constructed at the time.

My involvement in this particular film ended shortly after over some creative differences (and as I was purely the idea person, I had to cede to the vision of the eventual filmmakers), and to my knowledge the film was shot but never completed or released. So this may be the only chance this character has to see the light of day (unless I someday decide to pursue one of the many other potential narrative avenues I came up with for her over the years). Submitted in the hope that it will illuminate my own approach to characters while also maybe standing on its own as something of interest, here is the conceptual document I wrote. You are, dear reader, under no obligation to continue past this point as it is quite long, and I think the above will more than suffice for your weekly act of generosity towards my output. But it is included as something of a special feature for anyone who may be interested.

-cs

First Impressions / Dispelled Assumptions

Her last name is Bakstaad. That much I know for sure because it is printed on a small business card tucked into a yellowed plastic sleeve next to the outside door of her office, followed evocatively by the first initial “F.” She introduced herself as Frankie when she greeted me with what was a surprisingly - yet also reassuringly - firm handshake. I later heard her presented and addressed to and by various inquirers and associates as Fil (hotel manager), Freddie (homicide detective), and Francis (gas station cashier). I began to suspect that she withholds her proper Christian name from people with whom she is not yet entirely comfortable, though I never pried too far into whether or why this was the case as it seemed to me that to do so would be a violation of the privacy, she was obviously very eager to maintain. In any case, I saw her dip down into herself ever so slightly when I came into her office in an Oxford shirt (slightly wrinkled) and slacks, like she wasn’t quite sure what to make of me even though the leather satchel I was carrying was undeniably feminine, which I had hoped would allay any concerns and prove beyond doubt that I was not representative of any sort of oppressive system of cultural norms that would compel her to be anything other than completely open and comfortable with my intrusion. As such, I feel a slight and immediate guilt for assuming that she is a lesbian, an assumption I make since she gives the initial impression of being, for lack of a less simplistic term, a tomboy. She is in her early forties, solidly built. She wears an un-tucked polo shirt and cargo shorts, and her hands have the callused hide of someone who is no stranger to manual labor – in fact the one she offers me to shake nearly sands mine to a raw pink as it slides out of my grip and back to her hip. She is rather the type of person who, to imagine them in intercourse of any kind seems dissonant yet also comforting; there is a feminine power to her, and a strong sense of herself that, while not “womanly” in any conventional sense, makes her more and more attractive to me as the night goes on. At various points throughout the night, I find myself possessed by the thought of the two of us in bed together, the dense weight of her hips resting uncomfortably on mine, the soft scratchiness of the coarse hairs on her chin rubbing against my neck as she pleasures me with quick, Teutonic efficiency.

F Bakstaad gives me a brief tour of her office, which occupies half of a trailer on the southern side of town, somewhere in the dead space between the prison and the airport (the other half is rented out by a housing contractor. Their paths never cross, unless he is leaving early and she is coming in late). It is a small and spare space, and seems to exist solely as an independent hub for a business that could be run entirely from her apartment and her truck. She seems to have made the conscious decision to separate her work life from her personal life, probably because the former is so strongly rooted in her natural interests that it would at any point without such a buffer completely engulf the latter (which you truthfully get the sense that she wouldn’t mind all that much. Perhaps it is nothing more than an attempt to prove that the two are indeed separate). To the right of the door is a fold-out card table with a telephone on top, and the other two walls are lined with shelves that contain various true crime books, forensic encyclopedias, medical desk references, death almanacs, and a small collection of jars the milky, malformed contents of which I become afraid of inquiring about once I have seen her slide show, which is an introductory “greatest hits” sales reel of sorts chronicling before and after shots of the most outlandish scenes she has ever cleaned.

“This genius,” she tells me, “she gets to a point where she just can’t take it anymore, so she decides to stick her head in the oven. Except she doesn’t consider the fact that it’s an electric stove, not gas. So she sets the damn thing to pre-heat, sticks her head inside, and before it cracks a hundred she panics and/or thinks better of what she’s doing and tries to get out, but she hits her head and knocks herself unconscious on the grate, still half-swallowed by the thing. By the time they found the body, her head looked like a burnt marshmallow and the entire floor of the building smelled like burning meat.”

She tells me this story with amusement, yet also with the slight wariness of someone for whom such grisly occurrences have become completely banal – just part of the job. She tells me that the sight of blood and guts never particularly bothered her, even when she was younger. She tells a story about when she was in high school working in a movie theater: a man had a heart attack and died in one of the restroom stalls. After the paramedics had arrived and declared their services moot, they needed someone to help clean up the remains, which included a not-insignificant amount of fecal matter as well as grue. All of her fellow employees paled at the mere suggestion, but she happily volunteered. Not because she was drawn to it, really – she didn’t get off on it, or anything like that – she merely wasn’t bothered by the idea and found it kind of intriguing. It was the first time she had ever seen a dead body – her parents had taken her to funerals of aged, distant family members when she was a kid but had always made her stay in the car until the burial, when the body would be tucked safely out of sight and they could continue to imply to their daughter that death itself did not exist or at the very least held no imminent dominion over their house.

The most prized possessions she has in her office are a collection of photo albums detailing every single scene she has ever visited, organized by year. After the slide show she asks me if I’d like to flip through them and see more, but I respectfully decline, as it seems like they couldn’t possibly live up and my dinner couldn’t possibly stay down.

Minutiae

Most of the night is spent driving and waiting. We inhabit the space between sleep and waking life until a phone rings or a police scanner crackles. There is the usual kind of idle chit chat that usually passes between people who share a profession in which there are often long, boring stretches. She is sharp and has a good sense of humor, even if it is more often than not very dark, grim, and sometimes quite biting. She spends long periods of time in silence, which makes me feel guilty for occasionally butting in with my questions. Sometimes she mutters something out loud that I infer would have been said whether I was there or not.

When you hear that someone’s job is to clean death scenes, it conjures an image that is fairly outlandish and even a little bit romantic. Like a terrestrial Charon ushering the departed out of this world and into the next, I expected someone who carried the weight of their great charge in their very countenance, and predicted that this individual surely would be constantly weighed down by the ponderousness of their calling and would approach it with an appropriate level of import. It turns out that what she treats it as is a job. A job that she greatly enjoys, but a job like any other. If there was ever a morbid thrill to be gained from the work, it has long since faded. And yet she still takes a great deal of pride in it and derives from it no small amount of joy. Each call carries with it the possibility of seeing something that she has never seen before. Even though most of the time it ends up being some form of routine murder/suicide/accidental death, there is always the initial gleam in her eyes that signals that maybe this next one will be something special.

I have never participated in a police ride-along, but I suspect that the nightly routine for a patrol car is much the same as hers: prowling the streets until a call gives your wanderings a more direct purpose. We sit in silence for large portions of the night as a police scanner mumbles quietly under the dash. Every now and then the right three-letter numerical combination will squawk over the speaker and she will head in that general direction, waiting for a call on her cell that may or may not come.

The general breakdown of her arrangement is this: someone dies/commits suicide/is murdered in a house/apartment/hotel/business environment in a way that leaves a significant trace behind. The nature of American Capitalism dictates that those spaces need to be cleaned in a fashion timely and satisfactorily enough that said businesses can resume normal operations as quickly as possible. While the pressure of this dictate tends to extend far enough into some owners’ mindsets that they will entrust this task to their pre-existing in-house cleaning staff, the more shrewd of their number realize that it is perhaps more effective in the long term to outsource such work to a trained professional rather than to rely on a staff that will blanche at the mere prospect of seeing blood, so far is it outside of their normal realm of expertise and experience. F. Bakstaad no doubt nursed an inkling of this truth ever since she watched the faces of her co-concessionists wilt at the prospect of cleaning a poor old man’s hopes and dreams from a bathroom floor. This gave her the idea of starting her own business, which she did the way anyone else does it, taking out the loan and setting up the LLC and going through all the proper channels and procedures of gathering infrastructure and putting yourself out there and convincing people – especially important in a job such as this – that you were in fact a real-deal professional rather than a maniac. She knew just the right people to get in contact with and buddy up to – people in the police department, coroner’s office, hotel managers and the like – and this was made much easier by the fact that they were generally the kind of people who would have inhabited her immediate social sphere anyway. At this point, she is well-enough established and connected that, once her scanner informs her that some poor soul has shuffled on, she can place herself within the general area and be relatively certain that one of her colleagues will give her a call and have an invoice already written up and waiting. For someone who spends very little time at all around people and seems to begrudge even that very little that she must, she is a very adept businesswoman.

Even though it is certainly None of My Business, the specifics of her sexual orientation are cleared up for me throughout the night as I witness her interactions with each gender – a certain flash that goes through her eyes when she shows a handsome, tattooed man what’s inside the large trash bags in her truck bed, for instance. Her skin flushes ever so slightly as she speaks at length about a Sergeant Tillman, and when he lets us into our first murder scene of the night there is a shy and awkwardly extended flirtation between the two. Tillman is her main police contact, and while I don’t believe there has been any sexual liaison between the two there is definitely some tension – of the playful sort rather than anything hostile – that both may simply be just slightly too socially awkward to capitalize on. I even get the impression that Tillman may bend typical procedure at times to give her access to the particularly nasty scenes, but I can’t corroborate that. I try to ask her about it, but she brushes it off.

The scene that Tillman lets us into is the most outrageous of the night, and yet it seems pretty tame by her standards. There is a large pool of blood by the door, and a long series of drag marks leading to a larger, deeper pool of red next to the bed. A bullet hole under the peephole implies that the assailant shot through the door (likely when the occupant refused to grant him entry) and then forced it open, dragged the victim across the room and shot them again once they were by the bed (there is a large splash of blood on the wall behind the shattered remains of a lamp on the bedside table. The most excited I see F Bakstaad all night is when she finds a small fragment of skull embedded into the wall).

I am amazed at how fast she works once she gets started. She gathers every loose item that has been sullied – blankets, pillows, Gideon Bibles – and throws them all into large biohazard bags. She cleans and disinfects any solid surfaces that the business has told her that it does not want to replace if at all possible (usually all of them, including tables, bedframes, dressers, televisions, telephones, and the like). She cleans any window stains, and she cuts out patches of wallpaper and carpet that have been splashed with blood and bags these as well. She cuts deep enough into each surface so that there is no remaining trace of any violence. Once she is finished, aside from the holes left behind for the business owners to repair, the scene looks as if nothing so much as a fart has been expelled from a human body. And it has all been accomplished within a couple of hours.

As we pull away from the scene, she asks Tillman if he noticed the brain, and they talk excitedly about how rare it is to find samples that size in that particular pattern still intact. Once we have left it all behind, she pulls into a gas station and asks me if I want a taquito. I ask if maybe we should get rid of what we’ve just collected first, and she says that at the end of the night she will deposit it all at a medical waste disposal facility. It’s easier to make one trip rather than have to continue going back and forth and risk missing out on other jobs. The only problem is that sometimes, depending on the weather and the size and type of the load, the smell can get pretty foul.

I ask her to see what kind of antacids they have.

In general, she seems to have a self-defensive mistrust around other people, which seems to be rooted in an assumption that most of them will be inherently uninteresting and/or most understand or reject her. And yet the kindness and openness she shows to those within her modest inner circle also belays the presumption I made before meeting her that she would be a somehow cold person. To spend almost the entirety of one’s waking life waiting for the death of others – to indeed start a business whose growth and success depends upon the extinction of human beings in great, sustainable numbers – suggested someone who to me would have not much need for the company and affections of others. This turns out to be quite far from the case. She is not what would conventionally be defined as “friendly” - she avoids any and all contact with strangers and regards everyone she meets with an initial dubiety that it would take a great deal of convincing to assuage. And yet she very generously regards those who do manage to accomplish this feat, as you get the sense that they have done a great deal to earn it. She speaks very highly most of the night of Sergeant Tillman, for instance, and she has a friend in the county coroner’s office with whom she shares frequent text messages, many of which contain the most grisly examples of their night’s work. She shows me the most unsettling of these with the glee of a baseball player who has broken the home run record, or a tech supplier who has just made the sale that will secure his quarterly earnings – as someone who has reached the peak of their particular profession. A profession spent driving through still, uneventful nights where it feels like you’re the only person alive. I think she prefers it that way. There is sometimes a loneliness that can be felt emanating from her, but that lack of personal interaction is a sacrifice that has been consciously made, and so there is a sort of tragic nobility to it.

At one point we have to go to her apartment to pick up her phone charger, which she left behind at the beginning of the evening. It is a studio apartment that, much like her office, is spare. I expect gothic decoration and perhaps a coffin or two, but I think that such flamboyant expressions strike her as posturing. She is as unwilling to romanticize death as she is to fear or lament it. To her it simply is. “I’ve been at this long enough to know that, when all is said and done, we all just end up a stain on the floor.” Hard as it may be to believe, she does not say this in a way that seems oppressively grim. It is an acceptance of a certain inevitability, and the understanding that it is not likely to be a pretty or noble or even dignified end for most of us. But that doesn’t bother her, because she lives with that every day and to her it is completely normal. Not beautiful or poetic in the way someone would make it out to be who had little experience with it, and not overbearingly bleak in the way it is made by people who do all in their power to escape its coming.

There are more books, but they are less organized – stacked on coffee- and bedside tables, some lying on the floor face down and open, some with pens and high-liters stuck inside. It strikes me how complete and total her auto-didacticism is – there seems to be a constant push towards learning, an insatiable curiosity. Once these volumes are devoured and digested and made a part of her encyclopedic being, they will likely be moved to the shelves in her office to make room for the next batch. I ask about her education background, and she quickly tells me that she went to a year and a half of community college before her phone rings and we have to run out on a call.

I try to ask as many personal questions as I can, even though she tends to become a bit protective when I do so. She did not have an unhappy childhood, though she never particularly felt a part of any of the communities in which she lived. Her parents were supportive but always saw her as a bit of a novelty, and presented her as such to friends. She doesn’t seem to hold this against them – she says that she understands that they just didn’t understand her or her interests. She makes off-hand reference to a son of her own, and I can see that she immediately regrets it. I try to press a little further, but she becomes very protective, and I can tell that our relationship has been knocked back to the drawing board and that I will have to spend the next few hours gaining back my ground.

In Conclusion(s)

When asked later in the night for more information about her education, as a means of trying to deduce in the most polite way possible why she chose this career path rather than one in criminal justice or forensic sciences, her answer was somewhat vague if not potentially revealing:

I was an okay student, but just wasn’t all that interested in it. We had a gifted program in high school that I was a part of, and in our senior year we had the option of building independent study seminars around any subject we wanted, as long as there was a teacher who was qualified to teach it. Anyway, there was a teacher who had spent some time in FBI training before going into education, so I made myself a class on forensics and profiling. I enjoyed the hell out of it. I looked at some college programs, and went to community college for a while, but it never went anywhere. I just didn’t feel like those were my kind of people. It was mostly men, which I’m fine with – I’m more comfortable around guys anyway – but they tend to act weird around you when you’re a woman that they’re not interested in fucking. It’s hard to break into that world when they look at you like that – they don’t take you as seriously. Plus I just didn’t have the mind or discipline of a scientist or a cop. Too much dealing with authority and protocol. I wanted something that fit my lifestyle better.

I have no doubt that every part of that answer is, for the most part, true. And yet I feel like she’s dodging a bit there. To say that women have a disadvantage in forensic sciences as a professional field contains, I am certain, a fair degree of truth, yet this is not an individual that you would assume would be undone by such concerns. What struck me more was the sense of someone who had given up out of the fear that a preconceived notion about the world – ie, that no one would appreciate her, that she would not be recognized for her skills and gifts – would no doubt prove true and that there was thus no point in trying. But there was also the strength to take that resignation and make something out of it – the gumption to create a business that still fit itself around her interests and from which she was able to make a living. While she never had an interest in higher education of any sort, there is a blue-collar intelligence, which is not of a lesser sort in any way but is rather one that has not been refined by higher education to fit into any standards of societal norms. The edges have not been smoothed over, but this is not someone that you want to find yourself in an unprepared argument with. 

There are several times throughout the night that her phone rings and she avoids it with the same look of guilty disinterest. As I leave her trailer at the end of the night, I hear her sigh and dial a number on her office phone (perhaps because the recipient does not have that particular number stored in their phone’s memory and she can thus hang up quickly if she loses her nerve/thinks better of it). I regretfully admit that I linger outside of the trailer for a few minutes, listening to the conversation, and I even more regretfully admit that I cannot decipher whether or not she is talking to her son or to an over-eager lover with whom she has no interest in speaking at the moment and so is trying to keep just at arm’s distance.

As I drive home into the sunrise, I realize just how much I enjoyed her company. After nearly a week, I finally get over my nervousness and give her a call to see if I can maybe do a follow-up interview, even though I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten everything I need. I try to call at an hour at which I know she will be awake but won’t be too far into her night that I will be a distraction, but she doesn’t answer.

I still haven’t heard back from her.

1. For the life of me, I cannot remember the title of the film and when I try to search for it online all I found was a reddit thread of someone who was also trying to remember what it was. If you by any chance know what film I’m talking about, please drop it in the comments!

2. This ties in to some longer-form thoughts I’ve been mulling over in regards to narrative and its place within cinema, and my overall relationship to it. But that’s all for a future post.