If Bourne couldn’t remember, then Hayes couldn’t forget. The next morning when I began writing it was with the idea that whatever Bourne was, Hayes would be the opposite. I knew that now, and after jotting my findings on a Post-It Note, it was off to bed. All this time I’d been trying to out-think Robert Ludlum, create a protagonist who was stronger or smarter than Bourne, but this is not the way. Now, I suck at math, so how you restate a math problem in reverse is beyond me, but I got the concept. I was about halfway through the bottle and my thoughts were wandering around my brain like a dog off a leash when out of nowhere I remembered this article about Carl Jacobi, a German mathematician who believed the best way to clarify your thinking was to restate math problems in inverse form. When that didn’t work, I knew there was only one thing left to do-start drinking. Then I spent another couple of days re-reading the books and re-watching the movies, desperately searching for a solution. I spent days trying to write my way out of this problem, and when that didn’t work I went back to the source material. I mean, how good is that? Not only can he not remember being a cold-blooded killer, but you as the reader are immediately sympathetic because the poor guy can’t even remember his name. The best approach was the one Ludlum took in The Bourne Identity, when Bourne developed amnesia after being shot in the head. Only problem was that removing a man’s moral compass was pretty much Operation Treadstone’s bread and butter. Now, I’m not saying your hero needs to be a choir boy or the kind of person who helps old ladies across the street, but they’ve got to have some sort of moral compass. Mainly, an author needs to create a likeable protagonist. The first problem I encountered was straight out of Character Development 101. But one thing was certain: Adam Hayes was being eclipsed by a man who wasn’t even in the damn book. Either he wasn’t smart enough or fast enough or cool enough. And no matter what kind of literary sleight of hand I employed, it seemed that Adam Hayes just never measured up. You see what I didn’t know at the time was that iconic characters like Jason Bourne cast long shadows. In fact, as I began developing my protagonist, a former Treadstone operative named Adam Hayes, I told myself that not having Jason Bourne hanging around would make my life easier. A protagonist who’d give readers a Bourne-like experience, but not a Bourne rip-off.Īt first glance, it seemed pretty straightforward. My contribution was to create a new hero. A man capable of killing without hesitation or remorse. For those unfamiliar with the Ludlum Universe, Operation Treadstone was the covert CIA program that took Jason Bourne and turned him into a genetically modified assassin.
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