Article: As I spent some time...

As I spent some time in advertising before writing a novel about advertising, I've had a lot of people approach me with inquiries into which characters were based on which real-life people. The answer I give to people who want to know who so-and-so in the book really is, which person so-and-so is based upon, is always disappointing: he (or she) is no one. He (or she) is a work of the imagination.

The superstition that the cast of characters in Then We Came to the End must in some way reflect flesh-and-blood counterparts is not an unnatural or unforgivable one. I worked in advertising; I saw massive layoffs after the dot-com bust; some of the names of characters closely parallel names from real life. Of course people will assume that it is, in part, if not in whole, based upon the real. But here's the sad truth of the matter: my writing abilities are not equal to the real characters I met while working in advertising. In more ways than I can count, my colleagues were more colorful, more daft, more funny and sympathetic, than any character I could conceive and execute in any book.

Which is not to say I didn't start, in some instances, with templates taken from real life. I knew a guy who was erratic and high-strung, and a woman with an insatiable appetite for gossip, and a third person who kept a healthy barrier between his professional and personal lives. In an office setting, these individuals are hardly unique; they are archetypal. Anyone who's worked in an office probably knows someone who fits these various molds.

In writing Then We Came to the End, I started with such archetypes, compelled to include them in order to present an accurate and full accounting of office life. But once I put into place incident — the specific "what happens" on every page — I was forced away from the real, into the imagined. Meaning, I had no choice but to shape, to create, to bend to my will the way these archetypes reacted to what was happening within the reality of my book. And by that act of will, the archetypes began to disappear, to morph out of the underdeveloped and flattening cliches, into more well-rounded and specific people (though imagined) who reacted according to their character (disposition, self) and not according to some preconceived notion I had about how some real person I used to work with would react in the imagined situation.

So it is like this: if I started with some notion of character taken from real life, by the end of the book no character escaped being warped beyond recognition by what was required by the imagination and the exigencies of plot and character development. The characters in Then We Came to the End are their own selves, unbeholden to factual biography, confident in their reality, unreal as trolls and fairy maidens.

Copyright © 2006 by Joshua Ferris