Wanda's Book World

Welcome Guest Author Blogger Larry Baker.  Mr. Baker will appear at The Moveable Feast of Authors at the SIBA Trade Show.

An idea becomes a story, and then

the story becomes a different story.

Larry Baker explains the origins of A GOOD MAN.

I wanted to write about a preacher who was a phony, an updated Elmer Gantry story. He was to be a modern tele-evangelist who was more a scam artist than a man of God. It was not an original idea, but most stories aren’t. So I looked for my own angle. How about a black preacher? That itself was not a radical idea, but I knew it would be more of a writing stretch for me. How about a black charismatic charlatan? Why keep all the good villain roles just for white guys? But I had to build on that. Wouldn’t it be interesting to have the preacher actually believe his own preaching even though he is a phony? And when he sells the public on the idea of Jesus coming back, with himself as the chosen Prophet, why not make that false prophecy come true and have the phony preacher confront his own lying life which actually had a true message. That was the plan. When you read A GOOD MAN, however, you’ll know that I did not write that story. Author intentions be damned, sometimes the characters have their own story.

 The first chapter I wrote had the black prophet arrive at a radio studio in Florida at midnight in the middle of a hurricane. It was certainly a dramatic opening. I also needed a temporary foil for that preacher, some sort of burned-out radio host who was a drunk and a skeptic. I then quickly considered having that radio host become the storyteller of the black preacher’s story. I imagined a Jack Burden/Nick Carraway voice. It was at this point that I had my first spontaneous idea. I remembered a song.

Harry Chapin is one of my political heroes. His songs are stories with unforgettable characters, and I had always identified with the radio dj in “WOLD.” (Don’t over-interpret that.) Obviously, my host had to be named Harry. But, Ducharme? I haven’t got a clue why I chose that last name. But as soon as I identified my host as Harry Ducharme, he reached off the screen page, grabbed me, and said in no uncertain terms, “This is my story.” A hundred pages later I seriously thought about changing his last name to … something else, because one of those serious writer theme urges was hitting me, and I thought a different name would fit the story better. I was wrong. I kept hearing, like a voice from an Iowa cornfield in a baseball novel, “I am Harry Ducharme. Deal with it.”

I was hooked on Harry. He was more interesting to me than the preacher. After that first ten pages, I had his story in my mind: A drunk cynic, at the end of his career, sits alone at midnight in a cinder block building being hammered by a hurricane when a black man shows up to tell him that a New Child of God is coming. And there it was, so clear to me. Harry Chapin’s burned-out dj had ended up in my story, looking for a second chance. It was all so obvious, but then I had to give my Harry a life that existed before Chapin sent him into his downward spiral.

 In that first draft, I had already defined Harry Ducharme through a comment that the preacher made, comparing Harry to The Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” That misfit was a bad man who wanted proof of God, whose lack of faith turned him into a lost and homicidal soul. But I had intended it as a throwaway line, although I did briefly tinker with the notion of titling my own novel The Misfit after I figured out that Harry was the main character. But Harry was more than a misfit, I knew that for sure. He was a good man who had lost his way. A good man? The Misfit? Isn’t a good man hard to find?

Keep in mind, these mental acrobatics were all happening in the space of about an hour, as I was re-reading my first ten pages. And then I remembered another O’Connor story, one of my favorites, about a little boy who left his unhappy home one morning and went in search of a river where he had seen a preacher named Bevel Summers.

Sitting at my keyboard, eyes blinking, I felt one of those simple but profound questions sneak up on me, Wasn’t that boy named…Harry?

Harry Ducharme, I realized, was Harry Ashfield, who drowned at the end of O’Connor’s story, “The River.” I had to pull little Harry out of the river, save his soggy bottom, turn him into an orphan who is adopted by Quakers in Iowa, and have him grow up to be Harry Ducharme, a drunk in Florida.

And that became the story of A GOOD MAN.