In another life, some
thirty-five years ago, I was a police officer. It didn’t work out. I didn’t
like the job, and it didn’t like me. It’s much more complicated than that, but
I don’t have to the space here to
go into it.
The time I spent wearing a badge, though, and the several years afterwards, were formative periods in my life. There were a lot of discoveries, realizations and changes. Being a police officer means being a member of a very exclusive subculture. You only hang around cops—on duty and off duty. You think like a cop 27/7. It never stops.
If you are in a group of non-police people, they treat you differently. You’re a cop and they expect you to be one. In order to escape this, you go back to hanging around cops, where the chief topic of conversation is being a cop. It’s hard to get out.
The downside is that once you leave the police department, you are ostracized. That is the rule of the subculture. The second you take off the badge you have no friends. Other cops will talk to you, but it’s not the same. You have to go out and make new friends, and that is difficult because you still think like a cop. My experience is that it takes years for that part of you to go away, and at least in my case it required a lot of alcohol and drugs.
So here is the dilemma. There are many rich and interesting stories I can tell related to the time I was a police officer. But the setting of the character wearing a badge and a gun is—at least for me—overpowering. The police part of it wants to take over center stage and commandeer the story.
The reader expects it, or at least I expect the reader to expect it. How do I get around it?
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
As for creating your character, there are so many to choose from - your type of officer vs. the many different you worked with or around over the years. I would say "distance yourself" from your character, but from my 18 yrs in service through the 7 years after, I know what you mean when you say it is "overpowering." As for me, I embraced the sixth sense those years instilled; 7 years past and I am sorry to see that edge soften. www.mariasmeanderingmind.blogspot.com
Posted by: Maria Groschup-Black | 04/29/2013 at 08:16 AM