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TIMOTHY JAY SMITH

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Writer and wanderer

Writer and wanderer

TIMOTHY JAY SMITH

  • Home
  • Novels
    • Novels
    • A Vision of Angels
    • Cooper's Promise
    • Fire on the Island
    • The Fourth Courier
  • Screenplays
    • screenplays
    • Red Bandana
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    • Cooper's Promise the screenplay
    • Final Status
    • Checkpoint
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    • Stage Plays
    • How High the Moon
    • Johnny Casanova
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    • Destined for Fun
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A SUITCASE DOES NOT A STORY MAKE…

October 19, 2016 Thomas Seltzer

A man’s suitcase is lost on a flight he regularly takes. Five years later, the suitcase shows up on the conveyor belt, and you think, “Wow, wouldn’t that make a great story!”

Not really. That might be an interesting premise for a story or an incident in one, but only a character can have a story. Stories require conflict; suitcases don’t have conflicts.

A notion isn’t a story either, and last week I wrote how I had the notion to write something about blood diamonds and then expanded that to include human trafficking. Those were my subjects for context and plot points but not characters, and I still needed a protagonist. Whose story was it?

In an earlier novel, I had introduced an FBI agent and a CIA agent who had teamed up to solve connected murder and arms smuggling cases in Poland, and I thought they’d be an ideal team to work on connected diamonds and trafficking cases.  But every effort to team them up again felt contrived, so finally, I simply wrote the opening scene I had always imagined: my CIA guy in a bar in Africa.

He picks Cooper up in the bar. An Army deserter, sharpshooter, gay, and lost in the world. I hadn’t even thought about a character like Cooper until he introduced himself to me.

So I had found my protagonist, but how to introduce him to the world? The story is told entirely from his point of view, so I knew I had to give my readers a strong sense of who he is from the opening. Here’s how I finally did it:

The rain turned to steam as soon as it hit the ground, or so it seemed to Cooper as he ran down the street, stopping only long enough to help a woman load a box onto a pickup truck before dashing off again. He heard a girl shout from a doorway, “You going to see Little Sister, American Cooper?” and he turned around to run backward, water splashing at his heels as he spread his hands, silently asking, What choice do I have? The girl flashed her white teeth in a big smile. A second prostitute, the same young age as the first, cried out, “Why you go all that way, American Cooper, when you got a Little Sister right here?”

Cooper is kind enough to help a stranger in a downpour, has a nickname so apparently he’s well-liked, and has a sense of humor. He’s young enough to run down the street, strong enough to lift boxes, and is in some exotic place. All of that in the first paragraph.

Now I had to throw a story at him, and I did.

Trust me, it’s not about a missing suitcase.

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