The Antihero

The Characters of Steel Fear, Part 1

By John David Mann

SOFREP readers are thinkers, so we thought you’d enjoy a behind-the-scenes look at how the sausage gets made. This seven-part series takes apart the characters of the military thriller Steel Fear and shows you some of the thought processes involved in conceiving them and bringing them to life on the page.

“Everyone,” the writer John Barth pointed out, “is necessarily the hero of his own story.” You are the hero of yours. I’m the hero of mine. We all are, each of us, the central heroes of the stories we’re telling with our lives.