You know the feeling that someone is standing nearby watching you? What if they were doing that not to make you afraid but because they love you?
I generally like all my characters. If I’m going to spent fifty thousand words or more with someone I have to like them, right?
Then there’s a few who get inside your heart and never leave…
But that’s the thing with love: it’s not always up to us. Sometimes love comes out of nowhere and takes over. Makes you want to take chances. Do things you never thought you could.
And yes, romantic love does this, but so does true friendship. So can mentorship when given with a pure heart, in the spirit of service. So does love for yourself.
That’s all my characters are. Little bits of myself I set loose in worlds I created.
That I can feel such love both for and from these unreal avatars of my unconscious is part of the mystery of the human mind. I’ll take it, though. Unconditional love? We should all be so lucky.
We get them from drinking, from drugs. From the ending of a significant relationship. From reading a book so stunning you can’t imagine reading anything else until you’ve gotten over it. And from writing, though I won’t claim to have produce any truly intoxicating prose. Yet.
Funnily enough, one of the hallmark symptoms of a book-writing hangover is complete denial that that’s what you’re experiencing. I laid down 20,000 (coherent, edited) words in only a few weeks. Yesterday I cried as I wrote the ending, because it’s a teaser story for a series I’m writing next year so it doesn’t end with a happily ever after, or even a happy for now. And yet this morning as I sat dumbfounded at my desk, unable to rouse the slightest interest in any aspect of authorpreneurship, I didn’t once think I had a hangover.
Of course I do. I broke their hearts (spoiler: they’re not mad at each other.) And yes, fictional characters are just words arranged in a certain sequence on a page, but they are also active thought-forms, with what often feels to their creator as a sort of independent self-awareness. It takes time for the writer to detach from a deeply felt composition. I’ve nursed this idea for a year, and now it’s no longer necessary. There is a measure of grieving in this. The last book was worse, as it was the culmination of two years of work and hung on a character who has become as real to me as my IRL friends. That I can’t shake his hand is slightly painful.
Only yesterday I wrote that creativity is a strange phenomenon. The existence of the writing hangover just proves my point.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter. (Heck, try and say that five times fast.)
At 777 sizeable pages, it took what felt like all pandemic (ha hahahhhahha, but anyway) to finish. A good eight or nine months at least, in which time I became absolutely convinced that what we call cognition is merely sophistication.
Stack enough layers of iterative analysis on top of one another and the system behaves as if it were intelligent. That’s what our brains are. The cerebral cortex is literally the icing on a cake whose foundation is cellular away/towards membrane awareness. Maybe it’s my own of confirmation bias, but it made some damn sense.
While reading this tome (if ever a book deserved the word) I also wrote some 350,000 words of fiction, most of which I’ve published. My own afflictions and ideas like the preceding have made it very easy to feel the characters are real people who exist independent of my imagination. This is obviously false. However…
Even though there isn’t a thinking mind, stack enough data in a single system, connect the points, allow for feedback, and one begins to observe something like intelligence. Fictional characters do not have minds, but as they say, if it quacks like a duck…
Many writers find a strong character will “come alive” and present them with ideas they might not have come up with before the character was given form. One “gets to know” the characters, even though it is the author who adds the information layer by layer, getting closer to the point where that concretion of one’s own thoughts begins to resemble something that thinks.
This is when characters can “take over” and tell the writer how to change their stories to suit. Who the fuck is doing this? You, but also The-You-That-Is-Not-You. It’s the old witnessing-the-witness epiphenomenon. Which part of you is aware of your awareness? This has yet to be satisfactorily determined by science, and may be, like the sight of the back of one’s own head, not possible for us to fully know.
A fictional character certainly does not have consciousness as we know it. It is, in a sense, an AI script being run by the computer of your brain. However this makes it able to manifest behaviour which seems so much like consciousness that we pragmatically can treat it as such.
Let your characters tell you what to do. It’s just you telling yourself, but these backdoor shenanigans are where the interesting things happen.
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