Let me answer the second question first. There is conflict within Alex. (Short for Alexandra) I've decided it helps drive the story and makes infiltration easier to make Alex black. Because she's military and comes from an intact family w/ a military background, she is naturally of a conservative, patriotic bent. She will struggle with her "ethnic contemporaries". You know, the black conservative types that are seen as sellouts. Is she a sellout? Is she risking her life for a country that sees her as unequal?
She also struggles when she's undercover and away from home with pulling herself "out of submission" as it were and regaining her inner strength within herself. It's turning into a tug of war for her as she keeps her cover of a good Muslim woman, but tries to keep her sanity.
At this point I'm still working on her childhood. I want her to come from a stable, intact family, and one of the plot points I'm working on is where her intense drive to work in this manner for her country comes from. I wanted something in her childhood to trigger it. When I thought back to my childhood, I remembered writing letters to the hostages in Iran in grade school. After doing some research on the real hostages, I discovered that one of the hostages kept was a black military man. I may use this piece of non-fiction to structure Alex's parents. Having my father or a beloved uncle as one of those hostages would certainly give me a different outlook.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
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