Making a person
June 30th, 2025
by Neil McKinnon
My mind can make a person. But my mind is feeble. It cannot make a new person. By a new person, I mean one like nature makes in a woman, a unique person that is new to this earth. No, when I say my mind can make a person, I mean my mind can take pieces and parts of others and put them together. Yes, it may be a new person that no one has ever met, but it’s really made of parts that I’ve recycled.
Therefore, the persons that I make vary. From day to day my tastes and interests change so that the parts of persons that I find interesting and worthy of inclusion also change. So today’s person may look like my friend, Jeremy and talk like my brother’s boss, Todd, while tomorrow’s person may look like Todd and and act like my childhood self.
By inclusion I, of course, mean inclusion in a story. This means I must have a story in which to put my person.
Which leads me to this morning. My mind must make a story for a person I constructed during my sleep last night. To make a story, I need to leave my bed and venture through a forest of words. I must climb a mountain of paragraphs and take a lengthy respite at the edge of the alphabet.
But first, I must tell you about my new person. It’s a man. I try making women but it’s difficult. There are parts of women that I have no business even contemplating while going about person construction. These parts are not physical. Physical parts of women, I love to contemplate.
No, these parts are ones I term psychic. They are the parts that allow a woman to traverse the geography of culture in a unique manner. I do not have the resources necessary to make these parts properly. Therefore, the women that I make are not natural. They have a personality that allows a real woman to detect flaws. I’m thus exposed as a novice kicker trying to punt over the gender divide. Equally, I know some women that find it hard to make the psychic parts of a man.
So we, who are in the business of making persons, inhabit an etic rather than an emic world. We are like Frankenstein or a deity with limits. If we’re lucky, pick the right story and make the right persons for our story, we may be able to create ice or fire, delight or misery, and hence slide past reader expectations to stir him, touch her or impact them.
We cannot act like everyday people. We must constantly explore and re-explore our stories until the words coalesce to make a mood, create a passion, unfurl a tragedy, build greed and determine love. We must feel the terror of a lonely child and the longing of teen infatuation. We have to embrace our characters, then turn them around to embrace a reader.
To do that we may have to alter our person: thin other than fat, dancer rather than mobster. Scary becomes wary. A mind catches an idea and fingers grasp the air. A face now reflects dissent when its owner speaks.
Like a God, we make a garden for our persons but it is the reader who gets to taste the apple and smell the flower. Yes, we can create a world but we can never rest on Sunday.
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Neil McKinnon’s new collection of non-fiction short stories is A Ticket to the Grand Show: Journeys Across Cultural Boundaries (Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing $29.95). He is also the author of two novels: The Greatest Lover of Last Tuesday (Thistledown, 2015) and Tuckahoe Slidebottle (Thistledown, 2006).
Hi Neil
Your article perfectly encapsulates why I will always be a non-fiction writer – haven’t got the creativity to invent original people and plots.
It reminds me of Brendan Behan’s description of critics: “like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.”
Canadians like Neil will never yield to Trump’s pressure and bully boy tactics. Nor should he.
Very clever, Neil. The process of making a person sounds quite complicated. As I just write non-fiction, I have never tried it.
Here’s hoping you have another book in the works. I’m looking forward to it.
Neil, glad to see your mind is working. I know, it sputters at times and has trouble knowing to use a colon or semi-colon. We are in Rosarito near the ocean. And finally I welcome Canada to the US of A. Including Quebec. What a hockey team we can make with Canadian players.