About interesting characters and family lore
Plus, visit me on TikTok!
It took me a long time to figure out how to write a novel. In fact, for a little while I tricked myself into thinking that was what I was doing: not writing a novel, but figuring out how to write one. One of the many things I learned along the way was to make your characters interesting, by which I mean giving them an interesting trait or backstory off of which you can scaffold story. It could be a physical trait, talent or family history—really anything. Layering in these sorts of details can help your characters stand out from one another and also offers an opportunity for you to build interesting side plots.
In MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR, I gave Isabel’s father, Abe, an interesting job as the owner of Rosen’s Appetizing, a fictional appetizing store located on New York’s Lower East Side. An appetizing store, as Isabel is forever explaining in the novel, is a specialty food store that sells smoked and pickled fish, cream cheese and other things you might serve on a bagel. Appetizing stores are similar to delis, except delis serve meat and appetizing stores serve dairy. They rose up mostly in Jewish neighborhoods to accommodate people who keep kosher and must separate meat from dairy.
When I started writing the novel, Abe did not have this job (he didn’t even have a name). He was just Isabel’s dad and did vaguely dad-like things. Giving him an interesting job actually made it easier to write about him because it gave my imagination somewhere concrete to land. Making this shift was one of the first signs to me that I was writing fiction, that I could in fact make things up.
I wasn’t thinking about my own family history when I made Abe a shopkeeper, but Isabel’s fictional family background is similar to my own. My father’s family owned and operated a candy store in Brooklyn from the 1930s until the 1980s. The business was started by my great-grandfather, Joseph Wasilefsky, who came to the United States from Ukraine in 1910. Like many immigrants who arrived around that time, Joseph started out as a pushcart salesman selling candy on the Lower East Side. In the 1930s, he moved the business to a storefront in Brooklyn, eventually settling in a location at the foot of an elevated subway station, which was a prime location for candy stores/newsstands in the outer boroughs. After Joseph died, his three sons, Marty, Al and Izzy, continued to run the business. (Their older sister, Beatrice, was my grandmother.)
I remember visiting the store a few times when I was little. A candy store sounded magical to me as a child, but in reality it was a dusty and workaday newsstand that sold candy and cigarettes. There was a lunch counter where they served malteds, milkshakes and, according to my father, something called “frappes,” which sound like a distant cousin of frappuccinos. They also served food—hamburgers, eggs, tuna sandwiches—but I don’t remember this part. My father worked there when he was a teen as a “soda jerk” and also remembers helping to put together the Sunday newspapers. There are a lot more stories I could tell about the store and its place in my family history, but I will stop here. It was not all sunshine and roses, but I will say that the store allowed my family to live a decent life as immigrants to this country and was the foundation on which much of our later success was built. I can see a nearly straight line leading from there to here, from them to me.
Oh, hey! I’m on TikTok! You can follow me here if that’s your thing. Many thanks to my daughter Ellie for helping me learn the ropes. I’m taking a break from Twitter for all the reasons you can imagine and spending more time on TikTok. While far from perfect, TikTok can be delightful and reminds me that there are excellent people out there, including and especially the person who posted this:
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