Max Headroom

Did you know the average person has 50,000 thoughts per day? Some researchers put that number as high as 70,000.

That’s thoughts.

Not words.

Say, four or five or six words per thought. 250,000 words? Per day? String ‘em all together and you’d have a couple of books’ worth.

Per day.

Good book? Probably not.

Marcel Proust tried. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner all tried some stream-of-consciousness writing, too.

Of course, the end result is organized writing—not the free-form mess of how the brain conjures up thoughts throughout the day (and night). Someday, and it won’t be pretty, they will be able download every thought and produce a transcript of your day, right? Cops will have it easy.

But how much interior space do you give your characters? How much do you allow them to stop and ponder the moment, the decision ahead?

If you do it well, I believe, you can stop time. If the interior monologue is rich enough and moves the story forward enough—or illuminates the character enough—that headroom can be highly entertaining.

And this brings me to Pete Larkey, the first-person protagonist of the late Gary Reilly’s latest novel, The Circumstantial Man.

It’s a standalone novel of suspense, and the whole thing takes place in about 30 hours. The unemployed Pete Larkey wakes up one morning and decides to go look for a job, but his car won’t start. He walks to town and opts to have a morning beer. In the bar is a sort-of friend who asks if Larkey tried wiggling the cables on his battery. Larkey decides to walk home, after some self-loathing, only to see his car driving straight toward him, being driven by a stranger.

Yes, complications ensue. That’s what complications do!

Early on, Larkey is walking to town and thinking about his options (many day-to-day decisions flummox Larkey):

“I tried not to think about my dead battery as I hiked along the road. Victimization gets my goat. But it’s hard not to think about why you’re walking when you should be driving. It was only eight blocks though. Already on the horizon I could see the roofs of the Crestmoor strip mall and the fast-food joints that had sprouted near it like fungus around the drain of a bathtub. It was like seeing distant boats on a yellow ocean. The fields beyond my house are dry and fallow. They will be filled with castles one day. The human race is ever expanding. I laugh when I read alarmist science-fiction novels about an overcrowded world. They’re written by nerds who live in megatropolises. They think the whole world is like New York City. They ought to visit Nebraska sometime. They will flee to the tenements of the Bronx and pray that the prairie will never creep east and get them.”

A simple moment, injected through and through with attitude. I don’t know about you, but it pulls me right along.

Let’s skip ahead to when Larkey is dealing with a condescending con man named Benny. They are at Larkey’s house and Benny is ordering Larkey, at gunpoint, to go get his shovel.

“The gun was pointed at my belly. I was two feet away from him, and his finger was a fraction of an inch away from the hammer-release. The idea of a nexus, a moment, a window of opportunity passed through my mind, flitted, and faded. Speed was everything and he had the edge. But I did not want to get into the cab. That my death was imminent altered the shape of the cosmos, the saddle that Einstein speaks of, it became two dimensions with no thickness at all, was made only of words. Now, or ten minutes from now, or an hour, it was all the same moment. This man intended to kill me. I would pass through Einstein’s word-portrait into something else.”

If you know Larkey, it’s no surprise he’s conjuring Einstein when staring at his own death. It’s not the only time Larkey contemplates Einstein. Larkey’s got a busy head.

Your character can have a busy head, too. There really is no limit—as long as you keep it interesting and entertaining for us readers.

Inside your character’s head are a mountain of thoughts. That’s a ton of material to work with. And YOU, as writer, get to organize it all and show us their inner lives. (How much are willing to show us? Everything?)

Find the good ideas, find the good thoughts, find the ones that relate to the story, and drive your story forward.

What do you think?

 

PS: The Circumstantial Man launches Friday, April 6 at The Tattered Cover (Colfax store) at 7 p.m.

“Reading The Circumstantial Man is a stunning experience. Rarely do a natural gift for storytelling and an enthralling, lyrical style come together in a single author, but that’s unquestionably the case with Gary Reilly. As I read this unstoppable novel, I couldn’t help but think: what a truly unique voice and approach to fiction—the same reaction I had reading Thomas McGuane and Cormac McCarthy for the first time, two authors with similar visions, by the way. I guarantee you’ll savor every page of the unpredictable adventures of the wonderful Pete Larkey.” – Jeffery Deaver, No. 1 Internationally Best-Selling author of The Cutting Edge