Another day, another backstory anecdote! Today is wrote a story about one of my more important characters from the novel. He (Darryl) is a middle-aged doctor who ends up helping my main character (Corey) a fair bit, both with medically-related issues and otherwise. What  I wrote for him is a bit of an ‘origin story’ about how he came to be involved in the group where my main character finds him. It came out a bit unexpectedly, but not too bad.

I took my inspiration from two places. I used a combination of the prompt on Story A Day May for today (“ripped from the headlines”) and an idea I had written down in my notebook for future use. The latter was just a brief description of someone I had seen at a recent storytelling event — not so much idea, I suppose, as fragment. But it gave me a place to put Darryl to begin the story. The headline part came from yesterday’s provincial election in Alberta, of all things. The new premier’s father was also a leader of the New Democratic Party of Alberta and died in the 1980s in a plane crash. It was the father-who-had-the-same-job dying in a plane crash part that stuck with me and I used that to develop Darryl’s background a bit.

Of course, the story then went off on it’s own, but that’s just how it goes most of the time…