Characters and Reality

There’s been a lot of talk recently about authors interacting with their characters and about whether or not the authors who do so should be fitted for straitjackets. Points of concern include: 1) shopping for the characters, 2) missing them, 3) speaking about them as if they are real people, and finally, 4) caring about them so much that you won’t let anything bad happen to them.

I’ve done pretty much all of these to one extent or another. In fact, I love to do number one. It’s my favorite way to get a character fixed in my head. I go to stores and try to imagine what my character would buy from the clothes on the racks. What are her favorite colors, why doesn’t she like wrap around skirts, how many black sweaters can one person own?

The nicest thing about shopping for fictional people is that it’s totally free. If I find the perfect outfit for Amy, I don’t need to worry about whether or not it’s on sale. I can give it to her anyway. Fictional clothes don’t cost a dime. Lucky us (especially since Amy is drowning in college loans). It’s no different than cutting pictures out of a magazine of what you think your character looks like.

On occasion, I have actually bought clothes for my character. I wrote a character once who had a very tricky mindset, but a very clear and unique sense of fashion. I bought a t-shirt that was so her, and I wore it every time I was trying to write in her POV. It worked. (Thank goodness her taste leaned more towards t-shirts than fur coats.) A lot of authors find that playing certain music, or indulging in the character’s favorite cocktail can put them in the right mood. Someone on the Smart Bitches blog compared it to method acting. Whatever works, I say (um, except I don’t say it to Thomas Harris). I definitely take on some method habits when I’m writing. I’ve been known to switch up my usual orders at Starbucks, or adopt a character’s favorite phrases, or once, on an occasion I hope never to repeat, to temporarily develop a mild phobia towards a fear that ruled one character’s every thought. I find also, that when I’m writing Amy, my “blog voice” sounds a lot like Amy, and it moves away from that when I’m writing something else.

I think the inclination for a writer’s brain to file characters away in the same manner as it files real people is natural. The mind is programmed to remember friends — face, name, likes, dislikes, quirks, things they’ve done, etc. When I dream, and my mind sifts through its roster of people with which to populate my dreams, it doesn’t differentiate between fictional and non-fictional, alive or dead, place or time, or whether you really know them at all. How many dreams have you had where you are palling around with Brad Pitt, your best friend from second grade, and Batman?

So because I think the brain is programmed to remember fictional people on the same system by which it remembers real people, you get a little bleed. If I’ve been working really hard on my book, and Sailor Boy says something charming to me, it may remind me of George Harrison Prescott. I may hear a reference to the Lady of Shallot and all of a sudden miss Anne Shirley, whose world I haven’t visited for a while. (One of the nicest things about fictional friends is that they are only a bookshelf away, whereas real friends may be in another hemisphere.)

Of course fictional characters have to be as real as real people! We need to cry for them, root for them, laugh with them. Otherwise, what’s the point? We’re not crazy for talking about them as if they are real, or knowing what they want for their birthdays, or missing them if we haven’t written about them in a while, or occasionally ordering our hamburgers with their favorite toppings instead of our own, just so we can better describe what their food tastes like.

It’s not the behavior; it’s how it’s handled. It’s a hoary old thriller plot, the FBI profiler who gets too deep into the mind of the criminals, and can’t tell the difference anymore. Yes, that would be bad. We’re all agreed here. But I don’t think that makes the act of channeling characters a bad thing for a writer, actor, anyone to do. We’re trying to create verisimilitude. SB thinks I’m crazy when I announce that a character “told” me to take the plot in any given direction. But it’s just writerly shorthand for knowing a character so well that it is obvious what they will and will not do in a given situation. Are there people who indulge themselves into believing that the people they’ve created are real? Of course. There are also actors who check into rehab after playing drug addicts on TV. Most of us are just doing our jobs.

Which brings me to my last point (4). Most writers I know love their characters. They have to, to be willing to spend so much time inside the person’s head. We feel protective of them, and as a result of these emotions, may feel tempted to make it easy on them. This is a very common mistake, especially for beginning writers. They don’t let anything bad happen to the main characters. But we have to get over that. We have to be willing to “chase them up a tree and throw rocks at them.” Even if it makes us sad. I know that I cried through the worst things I did to Amy, and now, as I’m preparing to put her through her most difficult trials yet, I have to steel myself from trying to be lenient. This isn’t a question of mental health, but of professional grit.

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