Who the heck is Van Piper?
Van Piper is first introduced in Elm Street's introduction as all the junior high students are gathered for graduation.
"There was Van Piper, who was just mean as hell, and everyone knew it and everyone stayed away from him. It was a miracle that Van was even at this graduation, but there he was, sitting close to his smaller sidekick, Travis Jackson. Neither of those two would have been chosen to speak (at graduation) unless they had scared everyone into voting for them."
Van Piper is plain and simple the largest boy in the class and a first-rate bully who comes and goes during the book, at least once, to juvenile incarceration.
"There was Van Piper, who was just mean as hell, and everyone knew it and everyone stayed away from him. It was a miracle that Van was even at this graduation, but there he was, sitting close to his smaller sidekick, Travis Jackson. Neither of those two would have been chosen to speak (at graduation) unless they had scared everyone into voting for them."
Van Piper is plain and simple the largest boy in the class and a first-rate bully who comes and goes during the book, at least once, to juvenile incarceration.
Van disrupts first grade (Chapter One), assists a fellow student (Chapter Two), challenges a student to a dangerous playground competition (Chapter Eleven), instigates the torment of main character Frank Wilcox (Chapter Twenty), goes on a reign of terror (Chapter Twenty-Five), and disrupts the junior high Halloween Carnival (Chapter Twenty Nine).
Many of my childhood friends have tried to figure out the inspiration behind Van Piper, but the reality is that Van (and Travis Jackson for that matter) are composite characters. Composite characters are inspired by several different people. In the chapters mentioned above, Van Piper is inspired by a different person in each episode. And some of those inspirations are more about personality than physicality.
I use composite characters to limit the number of characters as a way to help the reader. Elm Street has a lot of primary and secondary characters already. Just imagine if I had added another 7-8 people to the stories for a singular appearance. Readers would have had a difficult time keeping up with everyone. There is a threshold for how many characters a reader wants to follow. Typically, a writer will determine the roles he needs within a book (roles like the leader, the sidekick, the dad, the teachers, the mom, the bully, the encourager) with a cap at about nine or so. (If you are a reader of Martin's Game of Thrones series you know there are exceptions to everything.) For memoirs written as novels, it becomes necessary to create composite characters as a way to manage the number of total characters. Van Piper was inspired by six different people in my life.
The best way to help you understand composites is to recall the 2000 movie The Patriot, featuring Mel Gibson in the title role of American Revolution patriot Benjamin Martin. If you know Revolutionary War history, you recognized that the character of Benjamin Martin is a composite of real-life patriot heroes Francis "The Swamp Fox" Marion, militia fighter Elijah Clarke; General Daniel Morgan, who was the hero of Cowpens; Andrew Pickens; and General Thomas Sumter.
If I had to write an epitaph for Van Piper's life, it would be that he grew out of being a bully, became a hard-working member of society, who loved his family and friends. He still, however, was given to laughing loudly over a well-delivered fart in a public setting and didn't care what anyone thought about it.
If I had to write an epitaph for Van Piper's life, it would be that he grew out of being a bully, became a hard-working member of society, who loved his family and friends. He still, however, was given to laughing loudly over a well-delivered fart in a public setting and didn't care what anyone thought about it.
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