I don’t know how interesting she is to anyone else, but Pocahontas, one of the protagonists of my novel Jamestown, was interesting to me to write. The historical Pocahontas lived from about 1595 until 1617, and was the daughter of a powerful Algonquian Indian chief named Powhatan, who ruled over a confederation of tribes in a territory along the coastline of what is now the Commonwealth of Virginia, here in the USA. In 1607, Pocahontas and her father were among the locals who greeted three shiploads of foreign, bearded men who would soon establish the first viable English settlement in North America. She would play a crucial role in interactions between the two populations. Since Pocahontas did not write any account of her own life that we know of, we only know her through descriptions and quotations of her originally written by Englishmen. One of the men who described and quoted her was Captain John Smith, an early governor of the Jamestown settlement, as it was called, and the upstart son of a yeoman farmer. Smith and Pocahontas were evidently friends of sorts. Famously, in one of his three accounts of his two-and-a-half-year sojourn in Jamestown, Smith tells the story of how Chief Powhatan had tied him to a rock and was going to have his brains bashed in with a club when Pocahontas intervened by placing her head on top of his. Pocahontas later was kidnapped by the English settlers, was taught to speak English, converted to Christianity, and married an Englishman named John Rolfe. She traveled to England with her husband in 1617 and there she succumbed to English microbes her immune system probably did not have the antibodies to fight off. Meanwhile, said microbes were decimating her people back home. Pocahontas has become one of the most mythologized figures in U.S. history. I was interested in how to work with all the different ways she’s been perceived and described down through the years and incorporate those into my portrayal of her. I wanted to create a character who is a collage of mythologies and yet is strong enough to convey a vital sense of her own subjectivity.
What kind(s) of character do you consider this character primarily to be, or how would you describe this character?
She is my fantasia on a historical person of great interest to me.
What is a character from a published fiction story by another author you would compare this character to and why are they similar?
Joan of Arc, Jane Eyre, Abraham Lincoln, Marie Curie, Britney Spears, for their courage, impudence, adventurousness, inventiveness, and singing, respectively.
To what extent did you use any pre-existing character formula, template, paradigm, character design, archetype, or theory or principles of making or analysing character in planning, writing, and refining this character?
Writing fiction is pretty irrational and intuitive for me so it’s more like a whole bunch of things are swirling around in my head and I don’t quite know what I’m doing.
How would you describe the first chapter, scene or section of this story in one paragraph?
Pocahontas tells the reader a little bit about herself while skipping through the forest. She also explains that English, which is not her first language, is cumbersome and crude, and may not be the best method of conveying any information, let alone the truth.
Pick one of your published stories. How would you describe the introduction of the main character, or one of the main characters, in this story?
Pocahontas is writing a blog. Her first entry in her blog begins with the words, “To the excellent person I know is reading this.”
What makes this an effective character introduction for this story?
I don’t know if it’s effective. I do know I wanted her—my version of her—to have a strong voice in this story, and to speak directly to the reader.
What major changes does this character go through, or what major challenges does the character encounter and how does the character respond to them?
Oh, so many. The world is in a terrible state of trouble in this novel. She responds with great feistiness. She fights against violence and injustice. She craves love and connection. A lot of things happen to her and she makes a lot of things happen.
How would you describe the most important minor characters in this story and the changes in their character, or the challenges they encounter and how they respond to them?
Everyone in the world of this novel is intensely challenged by their environment, a post-apocalyptic mayhem. Many die, which is one of the most important changes any person goes through.
What does the story gain from the minor characters?
Diversity, sprawlingness.
To what extent would you describe the characters in this story as typical or atypical of characters in your fiction stories?
This was my first attempt at historical fiction and also my first attempt at post-apocalyptic fiction. So they are atypical in that way. I took a group of historical figures who are integral to the founding myths of my native country, and I jettisoned them into a dystopic future, where they repeat or at least rhyme the lives they lived 400 years in the past. I wanted them to be real people weighted down with mythological versions of themselves.
The painter Willem de Kooning said, “I’m not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, lines, and color. I keep painting this way because I can put more and more things in—drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space.”
Author website: www.matthew-sharpe.net.
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