A Character In Search Of A Story

A fat guy.

Thanks, gus. You are certainly helping me out here.

From a long ago posting:

The young man is Griffin. That is his first name. It comes from some of the folks on his mother's side.
His parents own a small farm in Ohio.

Griffin is good-looking and brash. He can walk into a room and within an hour everyone has met Griffin and everyone likes Griffin.
He wasn't a great student in high-school but his parents were determined that he would go to college. Griffin wasn't sure he wanted to go that route but it beat working on the farm.
Some of his teachers wrote letters on his behalf and somebody made a phone call and Griffin ended up at a small college in New Mexico. I forget the name.

The story, part of an earlier writing effort here, goes on for a few more paragraphs. But you get, I hope, the idea.

The idea is to tell us about a character. This will probably bomb, but I do keep trying. -realjohnboy-

Johnny is a young boy. A Trim, athletic 12 year old spending his summer at the pond. Very smart, the kind of kid that when you looked at him you thought of him as someone who would make it in life. Always a smile on his face and an attitude that told everyone that he was confident in himself.

But has his whole life is turned around when his best friend dies.

I wrote this story a couple years ago. i really liked Johnny cus without knowing it i put a lot of myself into him.

His name was Jake, a musician, and he could sing and play a mean guitar by the time he was thirteen. Easy going and sociable, he managed to collect friends everywhere he performed, from church groups and weddings, to late night corner bars, he was always the life of the party. As the years went by, his great aspirations of becoming famous faded away, and he spent less and less time entertaining and more time with his bouts of depression. Most of his friends moved on, leaving only a small handful. Then, with a failed marriage and out of work, he began to drink heavily. In turn, his health declined as he refused help from family and friends, or to seek out any kind medical attention for himself. Continued attempts or offers to help him were futile. Then one night at the age of forty, he went to sleep and tragically slipped into a diabetic coma, never to return.

She was a fanatic wiccan. With half of the prayer-beads ever produced around her neck. She wore tie-dye to a funeral, held protest signs for women's rights while wearing a full length sky blue skirt. She likes cheese cake and eats it for breakfast, this may or may not have anything to do with her weight problem. Got drunk enough to burn down a methodist church, but not drunk enough to neglect her trip south to Mexico, where she was going to 'help the poor.' This turned into a decade of working in a factory making cigarette lighters.

Thanks, seed and colorbook. And a special thanks and welcome to dusty. This is exactly what I had iin mind when I started this thread. It is actually a slimmed down version of an old thread where we would introduce characters, put them into some semblance of a story and take turns "advancing" the plot. Early on in realjohnboy's settling into A2K we had some great success, with one or two stories going on for weeks and weeks. Some pretty memorable characters and twists in the plot.
We actually agreed to finally end one story. ie to reach a conclusion.

I tried to replicate the idea with an open-ended set-up involving strangers boarding a GreyHound bus in New Mexico. It was called "A Pompous Bunch of Asses."
If you are interested, you can find it back in my list of postings. Alas it withered and died.
So this time, at least for now, no plot. Characters in search of a story.
-rjb