Dicky Weed didn’t start as a character. He started as a stranger in someone else’s story.
A stranger in someone else’s story
I was watching street interviews online, the kind where someone with a microphone stops people and asks what their life actually looks like. In one of them, a man described the strangest people he’d crossed paths with living on the street, and one story stayed with me longer than the rest.
He talked about a man who had lived among them for close to a year, and who one day walked up and asked if there was anything of his things he wanted, since he was giving them away. The man being asked was understandably thrown by this, and asked why. The answer was that he’d spent a year living on the street and was about to go back to his real life. He was, it turned out, genuinely wealthy. That life had been waiting for him the whole time.
I’ve tried since to track the original video back down and haven’t managed it. If it’s still out there somewhere, I haven’t found it.
The question nobody could answer
Nobody in the story could say why he did it. Maybe he needed to prove something to himself. Maybe he was looking for himself and thought the street was where he’d find it. The interview didn’t answer that, and I don’t think it was ever going to.
That unanswered question is where Dicky Weed came from. Not the man himself, I don’t know his name or anything else about him, and the character who eventually took shape isn’t a portrait of anyone real. But the shape of the question stayed with me: what does it actually mean when someone with everything goes looking for something they believe only having nothing can give them?
From a stranger to a character
Dicky Weed became my answer to that, or at least my way of sitting with it for the length of a novella. Once I started developing him, he stopped being a thought experiment and became a person, eccentric, insufferable in places, and more relatable than I expected going in.
He’s a man convinced that profundity can be bought, and watching the world refuse to sell it to him turned out to be more enjoyable to write than the premise alone would suggest.
Dicky Weed is out now in Kindle and paperback. For more on how the book is built, see Why Half of Dicky Weed Is Told in Paperwork.