Supporting Character Sketch & Prose Syn.

Supporting Character Sketch Template

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Name: JACK?

Age: 35

Location: NORTH ALABAMA

Family History:

Career aspirations: WAS CORP LAWYER, DECIDED TO TAKE A BREAK, DO SOMETHING HE ENJOYED SO HE CAN BE AN ACTIVE PART OF HIS DAUGHTER’S LIFE.

Race: White

Features:

Appearance: Looks athletic (lanky baseball player type-not thick muscles) but isn't fond of sports


Likes:People who can admit when they are wrong.

Dislikes:Others assuming he is a jock by his appearance, dishonesty,

Physical condition: Healthy

Supporting Character Sketch Template (Continued)

Ailments: None, really. He worries about becoming addicted to alcohol so he is only an occasional drinker and has a two drink limit when he does. He has other addictions, computer games, etc, Collecting Star Trek paraphernalia.
Education: Law degree-was an attorney for nearly 17 years before he quit to do life story interviews.

Socioeconomic background: Upper middle to Upper class. Self made accd to his father. His mother’s family had money and status in their small-medium sized town (where Jack just moved and met Sarah) but his father didn’t approve of getting somewhere with family connections (because he didn’t have them), so he worked to pull Jack’s mother from her connections to family.

Parents: Father alcoholic businessman. Mother deceased about six months before his father’s the first rehab experience. They divorced a year before his first rehab entry because of his affair with the legal assistant but his mother always said to friends when telling the whold sordid story “Good God, the secretary, how original.”

Siblings: Only child.

Ambition: To be a good father and to get his business off to a good start. He wanted to keep small enough to do the work himself but large enough to keep his kid in outfits and food in the fridge. He had a year of savings to get it on the move.

Hobbies: Making films and researching genealogy, and watching Star Trek.

Significant Others: Daughter, Emma age 15 and just finished 10th grade. Mother deceased, father in and out of rehab and cantankerous. Wants to get to know his mother’s aunt, Maggie, who lives in old section of town with the oaks lining the street. And, newly connecting to Sarah and her son, Aidan.

Intelligence: Very intelligent to the point of geeky. He can play piano very well but doesn’t admit it often. It is his way to calm frayed nerves and he guards it as his secret comfort source but he refuses to play the kind of music he was forced to play growing up through years of lessons. His mother was a piano teacher but she long passed him on to more challenging teachers (who could get him to work when she could not). He got his law degree at age 22, early for most. He would rather talk about an interesting subject than gossip about friends or coworkers. Others think he goes on and on too much about things that they aren’t interested in.
Emotional Stability: Jack is pretty stable emotionally. He is amazed about this, having grown up in his father’s home. But, he realized after starting with Alanon a year prior to coming to Sarah’s town that he was better off than many in an alcoholic home. His mother was the typical control freak daughter of an alcoholic that married an alcoholic. She was always trying to get him to stop by giving him ultimatums. They rarely worked. She finally left him over the secretary, not the drinking. She died shortly afterward the divorce, of an aneurism no one suspected. The secretary left her dad in less than a year, but for her, it was the drinking that ended it. As long as Jack is over 200 miles from his father, his emotional state is much better. Any closer and he feels as if he is reverting into the shoes of a ten year old, both eager to please and fatalistic enough to know there will be no “atta boy’s” forthcoming.

Flaws: Not the best dresser. He isn’t wonderful about matching but he does try. He didn’t realize how bad he was at this until he left the corporate world where he only had to pick the tie, the rest was suit and white shirt and black shoes. Now, he struggled in the summer with plaid shorts and patterned shirts. He was a quick learner and Aidan’s comment about dressing like Howard on Big Bang Theory taught him to at least keep to only one patterned garment at a time and only one primary color at a time.

Other Traits:

Pivotal events in life:
Birth of his daughter, father’s first rehab experience, divorce, Alanon that showed him he had to do what was best for himself and he was not going to change his father or please him and that he was not alone in this experience. Quitting the firm, Meeting Sarah and Aidan.

Favorite foods: Japanese, anything that won’t eat him first. Allergic to peanuts.

Favorite music: Technopop, Fleetwood Mac,

Favorite reading material: Historical documents, reading biographies

Religion: Dabbles-generally protestant -nothing extreme

Personality:

Habits:

Favorite thing to do:

Comfort level with opposite sex: A little awkward at first but warms up. Not currently looking as recently divorced but open if the person is nothing like his ex wife.

Things he/she takes pride in: Following his dream and jumping off the merry go round rather than continuing to run the corporate treadmill.

Things that bother him/her:

Things that make him/her laugh:

Speech patterns: Southern-can drawl in plantation way when making fun of himself but typically doesn't.


Prose Synopsis of the Supporting Character:

Was corporate atty but realized he was trying to get approval from someone who would never give it-his father. His father was/is a functioning alcoholic who was relentless at pushing him to succeed but Jack could never do enough. His father worshipped money, status, his secretary, and his martini’s, not necessarily in that order. Jack was completely the opposite inside but ruined a marriage working so much and missed the first 14 years of his daughter’s life working late and on weekends. His life changing moment occurred a year before he meets Sarah. Several years before that, he had to put his father in rehab due to seizures when he had to be in the hospital for a routine test and was held overnight for observation. He lapsed into withdrawals and had to be detoxed. Jack had to put him in a rehab facility because his wife at the time refused to take care of him and was spending longer and longer periods of time abroad or with her own work as an Artifact Procurement manager at the Museum of Art. His father’s secretary had long given up trying to please her boss, and Jack was working 80 hour weeks in his inane attempt to please this man who raised him and to pay for the nanny who was rapidly becoming his daughter’s significant parent. During periodic meetings with his father’s treatment team, he was told about Alanon. He didn’t buy it at first and things went back to the way they were for a while, for two years actually. Then, when his daughter was 14, his wife filed for divorce and told him it was his turn to raise his child. She was done. She moved to France to be with her boyfriend, the apparent reason for her trips abroad, and Jack missed all the signs. He pulled up to a café in town after a doctor’s appointment and saw a sign next door with flyers for Alanon. It was a Wednesday around noon and, as providence would have it, there was a meeting going on at that moment. He went in and the rest is history. It was a long year deciding to break ties with his firm, get his finances in order, sell his house, and move two hours north to a town where his mother grew up. He remembered stories about the old oak trees and a community atmosphere where “who are her people” is asked much more than “how much is he worth”. He had the idea to make use of his love of research and writing and his interest in making movies (a fascination of his childhood).


He researched senior citizen populations and found a promising facility that allowed the full scope of seniors in their 60’s wanting to scale down, to minimal supervision/assistance and rehab, to a full scale nursing home all in one complex. It just happened to be within a few miles of the neighborhood where he found a house, in a great school system for his daughter. Things were turning in the right direction and he was excited to start his new career. He hardly even missed law. It was never his dream, it was his father’s.

After months of living off savings and purchasing equipment, Jack had business cards made and was ready to pitch his plan. He made an appointment with the director of the facility. She had an emergency and redirected him to Sarah instead. Having sworn off relationships after the miserable 17 years of marriage he had spent, he wasn’t even interested in dating. His finger still appeared dented from all the years of wearing a wedding ring. That was, until he met Sarah. There was something about her that his wife never had; the ability to laugh at her faults, to be okay with getting lost. It was endearing and gave him the sense that he didn’t have to be perfect to please her.

He was still a bit lukewarm about dating, but he enjoyed her company. When the summer began, she brought her son Aidan to work with her a few times during the weekend to get some work done and visit some residents. Jack met Aidan and asked them both to have lunch with he and his daughter the next afternoon. Jack was absolutely floored by the intelligence and quirkiness of Aidan. He saw nothing disordered or odd, but saw himself at that age, curious, awkward, enthusiastic about film and Star Trek more than girls, pranks, and baseball like the other boys his age. And, there was something refreshing in the boy’s inability to lie. He was likely to tell you that you smell funny or you had toilet tissue stuck to your foot and would also have no qualms with telling an embarrassing story about his mother with no notion that she was blushing from humiliation. He didn’t see the difference. Truth was truth.