My favorite story growing up was about my father’s friend Bill, a prolific but unpublished writer who in his “real life” owned a detective agency. In one of Bill’s many novels set in Chicago, his protagonist, a female judge, was insulted and mistreated by another character.
Soon after writing this scene, Bill found himself driving down Lake Shore Drive approaching Bryn Mawr, the street on which his judge-protagonist lived. As he told it to my father, it was all he could do to keep from veering onto the exit ramp to hunt down her apartment building so he could apologize for what he’d put her through. Although he was aware that he, as the writer, had controlled the outcome of the scene in which she’d been abused, he’d lost the corresponding awareness, at least momentarily, that his judge did not actually live on Bryn Mawr because she did not exist.
I was 11 when I heard this story, but I was already a writer, already experiencing the profound impact fictional characters have on the lives of those who create them. At that point, I was working on a series of stories (written longhand in notebooks and illustrated with drawings) about an orphan girl, Karen, who struggled to remove herself from bleak, orphanage surroundings and the cruel authorities populating her world.
Although I was not aware of it at the time, I now see how Karen’s goals clearly paralleled my own dreams of escaping my gang- and drug-ridden neighborhood, where frequent abuse of children and women, as well as a lack of education and dreams, made getting out rare. Karen, a brazen, plucky girl whose outward personality was the opposite of my shy, bookish one, became my role model. Often in disturbing situations I found myself pretending to be her, responding as she would respond and giving myself strength. At 14 I even developed a crush on a guy whose name and hair color was the same as Karen’s boyfriend’s, so strong had my identification become. It took me some time to realize that I could not write the dialogue or motivations of the boys I liked, a disappointing revelation that made my fictional world all the more attractive.
For those who are “born” writers, practicing a life that chooses us more than we choose it, living other lives (parallel or divergent) and the resulting catharsis remains fiction’s primary power. This power, and the influence of the characters we create, seems to increase with the length of a work. Short-story writers enter fictional skins in brief bursts, but soon enough a story may be completed and published, becoming its own entity, no longer a life-in-progress the writer can live. With novels, the process is more intense and more . . . well, let’s just say that some novel writers might find descriptions of their writing process under the diagnostic criteria for multiple-personality disorder.
However long the process lasts, a writer may go into a clothing store and find herself more attracted to items her protagonist of the moment would wear than to those reflective of her own tastes. Another may listen avidly to a previously disliked type of music in order to crawl inside a character who is an aficionado. Writers try new sports, visit new countries–some have even done new drugs to keep up with character development. (I returned to ballet class at age 31 because I was writing about a New York City Ballet ballerina.)
Oh, but it doesn’t end there. Ask a writer’s spouse how often marital discord corresponds not with anything as earthy as PMS or in-law visits, but with a crisis point in a character’s life. Ask, while you’re at it, whether in the most intense periods of inspiration even the writer’s sexual personality changes and the spouse is “cheating” with the writer’s alter-ego protagonist in bed.
Recently I completed a novel that had been in the works for eight years. The original draft quickly found its way to a desk drawer, then re-emerged as a series of stories–most of which were published–about the same people. Several years later, still unable to stop thinking of characters who’d been haunting my psyche, I returned to the novel, beginning from scratch.
As I put the final editorial touches on my manuscript before sending it out the door (like sending a beloved child off to the unknown world of school), I promised and blackmailed myself that this was finally it. No more writing about these people, ever. I have to move on, I told myself–there are other skins to try on, other lives to live.
But letting go is hard. Often over the past eight years I picked up the telephone with the desperate urge to speak to someone, only to realize that the person I wanted to talk to didn’t exist outside my mind and pages. Often I sat in the midst of friends and family and felt panicked that someone was missing. Often I looked into the mirror and was shocked to see myself staring back, rather than the eyes I’ve been behind all morning as I wrote of another life entirely. How could I surrender those viewpoints, those voices? It was like trying to date again after a divorce I never wanted: How could any stranger ever compare to the intimacy I knew with these characters? Yet like a divorced person, I could not live in the past; I had to move on.
And like a first date that finally clicks after suffering a dozen dismal ones, I could only look forward to the thrill of discovery, that first spark of infatuation, falling in love with somebody new and becoming another facet of myself all over again.
