Born on the Bayou

Whenever I am writing or creating a character, the first step I need to accomplish in order to keep going with them is that I need to know what they look like in my head before I can start. The first step is for me to know what they look like. I generally use real people are models for a starting point for my characters–but they do evolve from that initial “how they look” base and extrapolate the rest of their appearance from there. I also don’t base characters on real people, for the record–because you can’t. You can never base a character completely on someone else because you can’t get inside their head or know all of their life experiences and the things that shaped who they are and why they do the things they do.

I don’t base characters on real people because it’s impossible to do–you can only base a character on your perceptions of who that person is; you cannot know every experience they’ve had, every trauma, every event that occurred that shaped and changed and evolved them into who they are. This is why people–even ones you think you know really well–will always surprise you at some point. I’ve lived with Paul for twenty-seven years and he still surprises me. I didn’t know any of these men–all models for BGEast.com–at the time and of the three of them, the one I actually know is the one whom I didn’t actually use as the physical model for one of the three, and I didn’t meet him until the first three books were already in print and available.

But when I was creating Scotty, I wanted the readers to have fun with the books. I didn’t want to write anything dark or tragic or heavy; I already had the Chanse series to do that with. Chanse was a six foot four two hundred and twenty pound mass of neuroses, insecurities, cynicism, and bitterness; I really didn’t want to do that again because what would be the point of doing two series that were exactly the same? I wanted them both to capture the feel and spirit of New Orleans, but from very different perspectives. Chanse wasn’t happy about being a gay man; he was still struggling with it in the first book and slowly became resigned to it, rather than embracing it. Once Scotty told his parents and came out to them, he never looked back and started looking for his joy. Scotty’s family loved and embraced him as he was, and other than both sets of grandparents cutting off his access to his trust funds when he flunked out of college–which has nothing to do with him being gay; that was an attempt to get him to go back to school. The trusts were originally set up to become his when he turned thirty anyway, so he never really had to worry about the future–which is an incredible privilege. Even working as a personal trainer and some-time go-go boy for the money wasn’t that big of a deal; his landladies were family friends who’d never evict him in the first place and his parents would always come through for him anyway.

I also made his siblings the same as Chanse’s–I don’t know if that was intentional or not, but while Scotty is the youngest with an older brother and sister, Chanse was the eldest with a younger brother and sister he isn’t close to. Scotty’s family was tight, while Chanse’s was not. Chanse’s sister is married to an accountant for an oil company and lives in Houston; his brother still lives in their hellhole of a small city, Cottonwood Wells (small city, large town; I am never sure which is the right one) and I broached their relationship in the short story “My Brother’s Keeper.”

And I had Scotty live in the French Quarter as opposed to Chanse’s apartment on Coliseum Square; Scotty is that rarity in New Orleans–someone born and raised in the Quarter. Chanse was an import from Texas who moved to New Orleans after graduating from LSU; Scotty has always been here other than the two failed years in Nashville at Vanderbilt.

I wanted him to have absolutely no hang-ups or issues about being a gay man. I wanted him to embrace his sexuality and enjoy his sex life and have that Auntie Mame mentality of “life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death”; Scotty wants to have fun and enjoy his life. He doesn’t think he’s ever destined to find a boyfriend or life partner in the first book–he’s too unabashed a slut¹ who loves getting laid and doesn’t want to tie himself down, plus most men he meets tend to be too serious for him. Scotty has no hang-ups or issues about his body, either. As a wrestler in junior high and high school his body became strong, muscular and lean; he never says whether he thinks he’s attractive or not–he says other people seem to find him irresistible in the first book, and he admits he doesn’t see what others see but they see it so okay. He’s become more serious as he’s gotten older and as he’s dealt with bad things–but he doesn’t go into a depressive state or withdraw from the world when bad things happen; he faces them head-on, and his motto (life doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle–it’s how you handle it that matters) is one we could all aspire to, really.

While taping Susan’s show last week I did say that Scotty was the idealized version of myself and the life I would love to have–sans the murders and kidnappings and shootings, of course–and naturally a lot of his traits have come from within my own mind; but while I find his mentality and life view aspirational, I often fall short. Scotty has a genuine kindness to him as his inner core that I don’t always default to, much as I wish I could and did. I am a lot more like Chanse than Scotty, even if they are kind of different aspects of my personality and who I am.

It’s sometimes hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that I’ve been writing Scotty now for twenty years. Bourbon Street Blues came out on May 1, 2003. Twenty years of Scotty books, but only nine–like one every other year rather than every year.

And I also sometimes wonder if my subconscious somehow keeps track of Scotty, because I keep discovering things about him that I wrote years ago that were just kind of throwaways that now I can circle back to and create story arcs for these character traits and personal histories for the newer books.

1. There’s also a scene in Bourbon Street Blues where he proudly states he doesn’t have sex for money because he “prefers to keep (my) amateur status.” ↩︎