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Motivation for The
Trainer
I've struggled with insomnia for most
of my life. Nothing good has come from it with the exception of the idea for
The Trainer. One sleepless night in March of 2000 while working
as a traveling software instructor I went for a walk in an unfamiliar city. As
I walked along vacant sidewalks, past closed shops and dark alleys I felt alone
- as though no one was present and no one was watching. As long as I trained my
students and touched base with the office with an occasional e-mail, no one
questioned what I was up to in the middle of the night. In this pre-9-11 world
I could fly from city to city in week long increments with little attention
paid to me or the crates of equipment I shipped via Air Freight. So the idea
was born for a story about Robert, an inauspicious software trainer turned
vigilante after losing his family to an unsolved, brutal
murder.
That original sketch of the story was
brief and one-dimensional. After struggling to resolve inconsistencies in
motivation and lapses in plausible logistics, the character of Jacquelyn was
added and the unrequited love element was woven into the story to add greater
dimension to the plot. Drawing from first and second hand experiences involving
people with counter intelligence experience, knowledge of ballistics and sniper
activities, Jacquelyn's character gained layers of skill and intrigue. After
facilitating the existence of compartmentalized personalities in Jacquelyn
motivated by a tragic past, I knew I had the makings of a good
story.
Drawing on the metaphor that the boy is
father to the man, I worked to create a back-story for the adult lives of
Robert & Jacquelyn by presenting them as teenagers. Since a string of
flashbacks made the story uneven, I settled on presenting their teen years in
the first half of the book and the adult lives in the second
half.
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