DURING THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, the idea of artificially increasing human intelligence surfaced in my mind many times. It was a period of false starts, experiments, trial and error. Some of the early notes suggest opening episodes and different names for the main character.
An officer recommends his cousin for the experiment of having his I.Q. changed. Walton is a bachelor who has long been in love with a girl who works in the tapes library...
Steve Dekker has been in and out of prison more times than he can count. It seems that practically every time he pulls a job he gets caught. He has this self-defeating kind of personality that ends up in failure. He decides that this is because he's not smart enough—also there's a girl he's nuts about who won't give him a tumble, because he's not bright. So when he reads an article about making animals smarter he barges in and offers himself as a guinea-pig for brain surgery.
The story of raising Flint Gargan's I.Q. Flint is a guy who is crude, enjoys scrawling dirty pix on bathroom walls, fights at the drop of a syllable ... he's also filled with corny emotions, cries over sentimental gush, loves weddings, babies, dogs—has his own dog.
Flint hated school when he was a boy, left school to go out on his own as a plumber's helper ... figures school's not so bad for some, but doesn't think that he would have been helped much by it.
I try not to edit or judge while I'm writing. I let the raw material pour out, and if I feel it's good, I shape it later. But I didn't like Steve Dekker or Flint Gargan, and I wanted nothing more to do with them, or the dozens of other characters that appeared on my pages. I was searching my memory, my feelings, the world around me, for a clue to the character of this story.
I soon realized that part of my problem was that the story idea—the "What would happen if?..."—had come first, and now I was trying to cast an actor to play the role without knowing what he was like.
I decided to try working from the events that stemmed from the idea, and let the character evolve from the story.
The plot was developing through a sequence of connected episodes, the cause and effect chain of events, embodying what we call form or structure. But I was a long, long way from a story.
I tried starting later in the narrative, remembering Homers epic strategy of starting "in the middle of the action," as in The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Three days later they wheeled him into the operating room of the Institute. He lifted himself up on one elbow and waved to Linda who had supervised his preparation.
"Wish me luck, beautiful," he said.
She laughed. "You'll be all right."
Dr. Brock's eyes smiled down at him from behind his surgical mask.
The fragment breaks off there, but if I were the editor, I'd have blue-penciled this with a note to the writer: "'Smiling eyes?' Watch your clichés. 'From behind his surgical mask'?" If his eyes are smiling from behind the mask then he's going to operate blindfolded!
Still, part of that passage later found its way into the published novelette.
There are about twenty such attempts at beginnings, over several months. I had an idea I cared about And a story line, and a few passages. But I still didn't have the character I felt was right I was searching for a protagonist who would be memorable and with whom the reader and I could identify; someone with a strong motivation and goal who evoked a response from other characters; someone whose inner life gave him a human dimension.
Where would I find such a character? How could I invent and develop him? I hadn't the slightest idea.
Then, months later, he walked into my life and turned it around.