The most fun thing about writing fiction is the creation of characters, and if they aren't interesting, the book doesn't work for readers. Character design sometimes comes from prototypes, real life people, but it is most often just pure fiction. Some of my characters come from people I've known, but they always get a healthy dose of fantasy added to them. I like the characters who come from nothing but my imagination, but there's a freaky side to that. What if I create this character and then end up actually meeting him . . . in person? That has almost happened to me - not quite, but almost. And what about those places you describe in fictional works? Wouldn't it be really weird if you wrote about a place that was purely fictitious, and then in your travels you stumble upon it? That did happen to me.
I started writing stories about contemporary cowboys over 30 years ago. Most of those stories are found in a series called The Altos Cuentos Trail: The Adventures of Two Old Cowboys. I've written about 15 novella length stories in that series, and eight of them can be found in The Altos Cuentos Trail, Volumes I and II - four stories in each book. And I've published two other books that belong in that series. I do that under the pen name Cletus Duhon, a voice I invented back in the early 1980s. Here's where it gets strange. I wrote my first Duhon story, and in doing so had to create a background for Cletus. I gave him a history and then situated him in the hill country of Texas at a place I'd never seen before. This was back before Google Earth or even much of an internet, so I did some reading, got out a map, and placed my character near Telegraph, Texas. I gave him a buddy to share adventures with, created a small ranch (even went into detail about it), and wrote more adventures.
That was the early 80s, and I didn't get a first hand look at my fictitious setting until the year 2000, and that was when I moved to central Texas. Since it's not far from where I live, I drove down to investigate Telegraph. It's between Junction and Rocksprings. My wife went along for the ride. The country along the South Llano River near Telegraph was almost exactly as I had described it. I had even given directions to the ranch house where my characters lived, and just where I'd described where you turned off the main highway, there was indeed a county road. I followed it, seeing more country like I'd described in the stories, and found another road, this one unpaved and apparently the entrance to a ranch. "Well, aren't you going to go and see what's there?" My wife asked. "No," I said. "I don't want to know. This is just too damn weird for me right now."
The towns of Rocksprings and Junction weren't even close to the way I had imagined them, but Telegraph, which is nothing more than an old store and post office, was right on. How could I have seen that in my mind's eye? I'm positive I'd never been there, but I had seen it. Discovery is a strange thing sometimes, like when you stumble upon a place you've written about and find it to be nothing like your fictional account of it. Doing that screws up mental images and makes it hard to write about the place again. It's even worse than going back to a place you knew well from 40 years ago, and then you go back and can hardly recognize the place. I've done that and don't like the feeling I get from it.
Anyway, finding the real place I'd written about messed me up for a while, and it actually scared me a little. How did I know what it looked like? That experience left me shaking my head and asking myself, "Where did that come from?" But it also left me wondering where Cletus Duhon, always a character in the stories, came from. I had an uncle by marriage who was a Cajun, and I loved him a lot and knew his family. Being around a bunch of Cajuns can be a fun experience, and so maybe that's where he came from. But I made a cowboy out of him, and then got him involved in a long time friendship with a Mexican/American (Tex-Mex) named Bubba Espinoza. I don't know where he came from either.
Back to Cletus and my partnership with him . . . and yeah, we are partners. I like being Cletus, and not as an escape device. I don't need that, don't even want to fool around with that because I'm too much of a reality junkie. But you can get too involved with your pen name sometimes, especially if you really enjoy being that character for a while. I wrote a book through Cletus called First Frosts of Fall, and it's my one and only real love story. Cletus was married as a young man, it didn't work out, and he never married again. And then in his sixties, he runs across a woman and falls in love with her. It's a tough story in some ways, tender in others, and that's because it involves the death of the woman he's fallen for. The story, in part, is about grief and how he dealt with it. So, I wrote the book, and got depressed for a couple of weeks - not just a little depressed either. I felt so damn bad for Cletus that it just shut me down for a while. I didn't expect that, but I learned something, and I didn't have to ask where it came from.
Here's the long and short of it. I might've made him up to pen stories, but I am Cletus Duhon. We're one and the same with me being the real deal and him being part of my imagination. I've had a wonderful time hanging out with him because we've been on some great adventures together. Sometimes I put him in a bind, but I'd never written anything that actually hurt him. Losing the love of his life almost brought him down. Ok, so it wasn't real, but think about it for a minute. Real is what we think it is, and it's a temporary thing because time moves on. A dream is real to us when we're having it, and so is a story that's just made up . . . when we're living it. I lived the story with Cletus, and it hurt for a while, and then I came back to what's real. And we all know where that comes from . . . right?
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