Writing My Novel - Grief And War Crimes

Sharing a passage in which the protagonist looks back on the events that have shaped who he is

A photograph of the Moon I took last month through my telescope.

In my post about Julian Assange’s upcoming court day, which you can check out through the link below, I mentioned that I wanted to share an excerpt of the novel I am working on, in which the protagonist Stuart talks about how much the situation had impacted him.

Of course, there are some obvious parallels between Stuart’s and my own experiences, which I clearly used as the basis for these passages. Stuart as a character has been inspired by certain parts of myself, just as two other important characters in the story have been inspired by other parts of myself. In several other ways, I am actually very different from Stuart. That is just the nature of creating and exploring a character, especially in writing. You take something real and you use that to create something imaginary, a person who has never existed, making them feel just as real in the process. Quite often they are a mix of different people that you know, or stories that you heard, or even take on a life of their own. Even I am sometimes surprised by what my own characters turn out to be capable of! It reminds me a bit of what Gandalf said about Hobbits in The Lord Of The Rings. I may think I know all there is to know about my characters, but then even after a hundred pages, they can still surprise me.

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