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Names for characters in a book


Prince Myshkin

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I will find my life's purpose. Right now I'm enjoying the journey I'm going on inside my own mind. That's more exciting and it's starting to improve other areas of my life so I'm exploring that. I'm doing more than simply existing so I can't complain.

 

How does The Prescribed Realities of William Kearn sound? That will be his real name. But it will only be mentioned once, towards the end, when he is told who he really is (since he is currently convinced he is the person he was pretending to be whilst an under over police officer and therefore that will be what he is referred to throughout the book). Unsure of what that name will be.

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There are two main characters. One is William (name subject to change, but he needs a name for the second whilst I explain) and the other is the stranger. William was an undercover police officer but he started believing his fictional life more than his actual life (I recently read an article about undercover work and it intrigued me. One of the guys was saying when he was pretending to be a millionaire, driving sports cars and going to fancy functions etc it's hard not to get caught up in it and start to believe you are actually a millionaire, and many undercover policemen and women need psychiatric help after playing a role as it can really affect you). The story is set either now but if the world had developed a different way and the general public had quite a few less freedoms, or set in thirty years time in a world that has evolved for the worse. Incidentally I don't believe this will happen, but I find it interesting imagining if it did. I'm not going to go into detail on these differences. I'll just stick to the main plot.

 

William is living alone in abandoned buildings as he is aware that people are trying to find him. His girlfriend or wife has died and so he is suffering from manic depression and is something of a hermit. We later find out that his girlfriend or wife is of course not real but instead a colleague who he worked with undercover and actually a friend. He is convinced he loves her though. She is not dead, she is no longer working on the case, but they faked her death because it was too dangerous for he to continue on the case. As far as William is concerned though, she is dead.

 

William is prone to fevers because he does not look after himself properly and it is winter. He also sometimes falls into the manic side of manic depression which is dangerous to both himself and those around him. In this case the stranger is the one who is with him, as he doesn't have contact with anybody else any more.

 

The people who William worked for believe that he knows something very dangerous which they do not want people (the general public) to know, as well as something regarding the case which would help them. I have not yet decided what this is. It later transpires that he does not know about this. William has gone missing from the case and his employers are aware of his mental issues and so the stranger has been sent to find him, find out the information and kill him as he has become a liability, now that he is losing control of his senses and knows such sensitive information.

 

The media has begun to fill with propaganda against William who is now a wanted man, in order to discredit him and ensure both that there is reasoning behind his impending death and that he will not be missed. This has, however, alerted a small band of freedom fighters who are trying to get to William too, as his treatment in the newspapers is similar to a previous controversial case in which somebody believed to be innocent was killed.

 

The stranger must therefore keep moving to various safe houses to keep away from these people. He therefore portrays himself as somebody who is saving William and the freedom fighters (who we never meet but have close calls with, and only find out about at the end when the stranger confesses) as the people who are trying to kill William.

 

William is wary of the stranger but given their extended periods together in confinement they begin to bond and share their life's philosophies (which was the main reason for me writing the book). William is effectively being held hostage although he does not yet realise.

 

As he moves in and out of fever he becomes suspicious of the stranger and becomes convinced that his mood swings and vivid dreams are actually being brought on by a drug that the stranger is giving him without him knowing. He had heard of a new drug being developed in order to further control the masses. Designed in order to create a generational split and provide the government with a generation that is almost a fresh slate, ready to mould as they wish. It is a drug with similar qualities to acid in that it gives the user a completely different experience to what they can achieve in reality and makes them feel as though they are connecting with themselves and those around them on a greater level, except it breeds contentedness and starves motivation, much in the same way marijuana can. As the war on drugs is over, a new acceptance of the drug rises amongst the younger generations, though the seed of that war are still very much planted within the minds of the older generation. Whilst it is far from a direct split of the generations, it is enough to be noticeable, and enough to lead the younger generations into a more vulnerable state and more susceptible for shock tactics and fear propaganda used by those in charge and subliminal messaging etc.

 

This however is not true, William is not being given this drug, he simply has a combination of fever and manic depression. His growing distrust of the stranger because of his paranoia regarding the drug leads to him searching through the strangers clothes as he sleeps. He finds a gun and takes the stranger hostage with it and thus roles are reversed. After lengthy discussions and frank talking about who William really is, the stranger confesses. There is a certain level of Stockholm Syndrome throughout as the stranger becomes more and more aware that William is oblivious to the situation he is in and is not the danger that his employers perceive him as. William, realising that he has no real grip on reality and is effectively a dead man walking, commits suicide. The one thing that had kept him going, his love for his dead girlfriend or wife, had proven to be fiction and he sees nothing else worth living for and he certainly isn't strong enough for it in his current state.

 

The stranger, intrigued with some of the discussions he had had with William on matters such as Nihilism, and as almost a new person given his new perspectives on the life he has lived decides he must act in order to atone for the death of William, who he blames himself for. He therefore goes on a brief killing spree, beginning with some of the freedom fighters who he sees as necessary victims in order to get to those who he feels need to die, then attempting to take out key officials who have been at the forefront of controlling the population and had been hunting down people like William. The stranger is eventually gunned down himself and stopped but not before he has chalked up an impressive death toll including many innocent people. The strangers views on nihilism were in fact far more dangerous than William's.

 

 

 

 

 

 

That's pretty much the story. But the main reason for writing is for the dialogue between the two and the way they both interpret their surroundings. The prescribed realities are both the under cover character who William plays (who he then begins to believe he is) and the reality forced on the population which has been created by those in charge in order to suppress them and limit their freedoms which has become accepted by almost all.

 

 

 

I hope that kind of makes sense.

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It sounds pretty good, I'm just a bit confused about how the stranger is linked with William and how he becomes a wanted man, does his paranoia lead him to kill someone?

 

I once watched part of this documentary about this man who fell in love with someone in a criminal group he was undercover in, and he said pretty much the same in that he felt paranoid and edgy especially when they started to know someone was tipping them off.

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It sounds pretty good, I'm just a bit confused about how the stranger is linked with William and how he becomes a wanted man, does his paranoia lead him to kill someone?

 

I once watched part of this documentary about this man who fell in love with someone in a criminal group he was undercover in, and he said pretty much the same in that he felt paranoid and edgy especially when they started to know someone was tipping them off.

 

The stranger goes in as a hired person to obtain information from William regarding the case he had been undercover in and then kill him as it is dangerous for a man with William's mental deficiencies to have that information. I've yet to decide what that information is haha.

 

And the stranger loses faith in the job he is doing after intimate discussions with William, seeing that he does not in fact have any of the knowledge that they suspect him of having and that he is in fact a fragile and troubled person with goodness in his heart. He then decides it is time to make a stand against those above them, but with his new fascination with nihilism he decides the best way is to shoot his way through the system, which of course fails, but causes a rather wonderful ripple.

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I like the title for my book but I fear it gives too much away if I use his real name in the title (which isn't revealed to the end), and if I use his under cover name the title makes less sense.

 

(As a reminder the title was going to be - The Prescribed Realities of William Kearn. William Kearn being his real name, not the name he will be called by for the majority of the book)

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