Writer's Corner: Q&A About 'Reunion: A Story": Naming Characters and the Musical Influences in 'Reunion'

(C) 2018 Alex Diaz-Granados and CreateSpace (an Amazon company)

It is February 1998. 33-year-old Jim Garraty is a respected history professor and bestselling author who lives in New York City. Popular with both students and readers, Jim seems to have it all. Fame, a nice apartment in Manhattan, and a reputation as one of the best World War II historians in the U.S. But when he gets a cryptic email from his best friend from high school, Jim is forced to relive his past - and a trip to his home town of Miami reopens old wounds he thought had healed long ago.

Q.: How - or why - did you choose your characters' names? Did you go through a phone book and choose names at random or did you name Jim, Marty, and Mark after people you know?

A.: Jim Garraty - or as Stephen King would put it, my I-guy - was, in every iteration of the story (from a CRW-2001 assignment to finished product), Jim Garraty. I'm not sure why I chose James/Jim/Jimmy as his first name; I just knew that I didn't want to name the character after myself. I didn't want anyone to think that the story was essentially a roman à clef, which is a French term for a novel based on real people and real situations, with only the names changed to protect the identities of the people described in it. (Roman à clef, literally translated, means "novel with a key.")

I think - I'm not sure - that I chose "Jim" for my I-guy because I'm a Star Trek fan. James T. Kirk (or simply "Jim") is my favorite Captain of the franchise, so that's probably why I chose that name for the story's protagonist. 

As for his last name....Years ago, I bought and read The Bachman Books an anthology of novels written by Stephen King using the pen name "Richard Bachman."  It contains The Long Walk,  a dystopian story set in a fascist dictatorship set up in a near-future America. King/Bachman gave the protagonist the name "Garraty," and even though The Long Walk is not one of my favorite reads, I liked the character's last name. So I pinched that from the Master of Horror himself. 

As for Mark Prieto....I named Jim's best friend and confidante after my own best friend of my "tweens." We became friends in 1975 and hung out regularly for about two years till Mom got the notion - ill-conceived, I think - to sell our home in Westchester and buy a townhouse in the Fountainbleau area in the summer of 1977. After that, we talked on the phone or he would ride out to visit me on his bike until he, too, moved away from the old neighborhood. His divorced mother remarried, so she sold her house - which had been two houses away from our former residence - and moved to New England with her new hubby, Mark, and her younger daughter Leslie. Mark later moved back to Miami to be with his dad for a while, attended Coral Park Senior High for a year, then relocated once again to Michigan, where his mom, stepdad, and sister now lived.  We exchanged a couple of letters during the 1981-82 school year, but for some reason he stopped writing. I have not seen or heard any news from him since.   

Martina Elizabeth Reynaud ("Marty") - I wanted to give my female lead a unique name and identity, so I named her after a famous tennis player, Martina Navartilova. "Elizabeth" I cribbed from my friend Betsy, whose formal name is...well, Elizabeth. The last name, "Reynaud," I plucked out of thin air, although World War II buffs will probably say I was inspired by a certain French prime minister, who, per Wikipedia, "was Prime Minister during the German defeat of France in May and June 1940; he persistently refused to support an armistice with Germany and resigned on 16 June."  That's an interesting theory, but it just isn't so. I could have given Marty one of those stuffy-sounding compound names that some British families use, something like "Martina Stafford-Mills," but I thought that was too stereotypical, so I went for a more exotic Anglo-French vibe instead. 

Q.: You already told us how and why Billy Joel's Scenes from an Italian Restaurant influenced Reunion: A Story's structure and emotional undertones. Was music always an integral part of the story, both within the characters' world and your writing environment? 

A.: I no longer have my original CRW-2001 "dream sequence," so I can't honestly say that music was always part of the story from the start. But as far as the present version of Reunion, music is almost like a fourth main character as well as the wellspring for creative inspiration. 

For instance, when I came up with the idea of the dream sequence in which Jim and Marty dance together, I wanted to quote a few lines from the song the band (which I suppose could have been the Four Tops or even The Platters) plays in the imaginary ballroom. 

In my original draft, the song I chose was another Billy Joel song, This Night, which was from an album that came out almost around the time in which Reunion is set: An Innocent Man. 

Now, I've always thought that This Night is perfect as the song to accompany Jim and Marty as they dance in that magical ballroom of the imagination. It fits the theme of the story...and I listened to it on my stereo as I wrote that part of Reunion. 

Unfortunately, I was advised that if I ever wanted to publish the story in any format or venue - even as a free read on a website - I'd have to get permission from Billy's music publishing company and pay for the rights to use several stanzas from This Night . If I had had the means - then or even now - I probably would have gone that route. But...alas, I didn't and still don't. So I reluctantly went back to my original Word file and changed the song to something I made up while I listened to this:

So, for legal reasons, I had to write a poem that sorta, kinda fits the Michel Legrand melody. The resulting "song" is not the best bit of writing I've ever done, and it kind of mars the dream sequence for me, personally. In my imagination, Jim and Marty will forever be dancing to This Night.  But sometimes you just have to work with what you have, and that's what I did. 

I also like to listen to music when I write. Quite often, I tend to think of my stories in cinematic terms, so I often try to imagine what the score would sound like if they would ever be adapted into feature films. I did this when I wrote a 40-page "novel" for my ninth grade English class back in 1980; I did it again when I worked on Reunion in the summer of 1998. 

When I wrote the passages describing Jim's "reunion" in Miami as an adult and his journey through the halls of South Miami High on that last day of school, I listened to two then-current soundtracks as my "temp track" for the "score." One was James Horner's Titanic, and the other was John Williams' Saving Private Ryan.

Specifically, I listened to two basic themes. 

When I was crafting the 1998-set frame story, I mostly listened to this:

   

And when I wrote the passages in which Jim wanders around the halls in the 1983 main story, I listened to this: 

Finally, when I was making some last-minute edits to the CreateSpace and Kindle versions for publication, I again turned to Maestro Williams' music for inspiration.