The Bones of “Who You Know”
Junior knew what he’d have to do ever since Kā‘eo had pulled a pistol on him.
Some characters stay with you long after you write them; lives unexplored, archived in your notes and scrapped documents. They haunt you, but we all know that sometimes a page, a section, a scene is all they may get because it isn’t their story.
For me, Junior, from my novel Between Sky and Sea: a Family’s Struggle is one of those characters. To be fair, as the best friend of eldest brother Kāʻeo and the person who gets him involved with meth, he gets a good amount of time on the page. But he deserved a section of his own. His family could have been another novel.
I have notes and notes on his character. I had an entire arc mapped out for him, yet he only really appears in less than 10% of the novel (I did the math).
Photo credit: Donald Carreira Ching
Then, while working on Blood Work, I found him folded up and buried inside a notebook. Since many of the stories in the collection take place in Kahaluʻu and Kāneʻohe and during the same period, why couldn’t I bring him back?
Interestingly, this opened up a possibility for the collection that I didn’t think of before. What if, rather than these stories being separate, they were all connected in some way, with some characters appearing or referenced in other stories? What if other characters I’d written, like those from my novel, simply appeared as a minor detail that’s never mentioned or discussed again? A nod to those who might recognize them.
How would doing this change the story I was telling with this collection and across my work? How would this change the dimensions of these stories?
If you’re a short story writer like me, it’s an interesting idea.*
More laters,
Donald
*PS: If you missed Donald’s Writing Jam on 5/31/2025, keep an eye on our YouTube page. BR minions Misty and Lizzy may or may not upload a recording.
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