Cyril LeMarchand's Blog: On Writing and Becoming a Society of Cyborgs

When I started The Last American: A Novel several years ago, I had figured that one character would be the hero of the story.

I had this romanticized concept of who he was and how he would interact with the other characters in the novel. When I actually got into the story however, he became more complex, his motivations started to be a bit less than honorable. For me my characters live in my mind, they are always there, and writing is a lot like note-taking, just writing down what is going on.

The characters who were originally meant to have only moderate depth, took on a robust quality and I found myself liking some of them far better than I liked my erstwhile protagonist. Eventually one of them just entirely dominated the story.

It was one of the strangest things to have happened to me while writing, however it was also one of the most rewarding. As I continue to work through edits to The Last American and continue to develop the plot to the adjacent novels, I'm looking forward to having this process continue. If I'm lucky, one of my new characters will emerge as the hero and take over my next novel as well.