On Writing and Return (The Second Entry)

There is a relationship between an author or authoress and their characters that goes deeper than non-writers might suppose.

Characters are, ultimately, a creation ex nihilo, a figment of thought given flesh and bones and motivations and emotions by words only.  To create a character is, in a very real way, to create an imaginary friend.

Some of the imaginary friends go nowhere, two dimensional cutouts or stock characters that disappear as quickly as they come as there is little to them.  Some others, though, take on a life of their own and become "real", as real as physical people.

Intuitively we know this happens.  We likely all have fictional characters that became real to us, perhaps real in ways those living were not.  When I was growing up, Edgar Rice Burrough's John Carter and Tars Tarkas and Dejah Thoris roamed my brain along with Robert E. Howard's Conan.  These were the ones that had series, but stand alone books - Andre Norton, H. Beam Piper - also created characters that had mental flesh and bones, were the sort of people one could imagine meeting.  And now later, the characters of Jerry Pournelle and Dostoevsky and Sir Walter Scott wander in and out of phase.

In many of the compilation books of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian edited by L. Sprague de Camp, a snippet was often included from one of Howard's letters in which he stated that he often felt less like he was writing fiction and more like he was simply conveying a history, a history that someone else was telling him.  It was not "his" story; it was someone else's story that he was relating.

It would also be ridiculous to assume that external events and time never have impact on writers and how they write.  Our experiences inform us as we go older and we simply have more depth and memories to write from; our view of events over time also change as we have the ability to see decisions play out in real time and judge them against their original declared intentions.  For the most part, the end and the beginning seldom match up.

When I started writing The Collapse 5 years ago (if one can believe it has been going that long),  it was originally just intended as a thought exercise on a certain set of circumstances:  an older single retired man who is approached for a simple request - consider re-entering the workforce - looks around, and realizes that the time is later than he thinks.  One thought exercise turned into another, and another, and before I knew it, I had a series going on.

But something else happened along the way as well:  the fictional character, Seneca, turned into more that just a collection of imagination and words. He became a person.

A fair question to ask, I suppose, is "Is he me?"  Maybe.  Parts of him are.  But as I have written of him over the years, parts of him have turned out to be completely his own.

It is exciting and dangerous when this happens, when "the character" becomes "the person".  On the bright side, writing can become easier as the character begins to relate things instead of the author telling the character.  I do not "generate content" in that sense of the word, I am truly just writing down what someone is relating to me.

The less good part, of course, is that the character is no longer a simple extension of the author.  The character can - and in my case has - flatly refused to be written into certain things or even tell me certain things about him (the impudence).  Having achieved some level of agency, the character elects in some cases to tell me what I am going write of him, not the other way around.

Originally I had no idea where this story was going to go - and to be fair, it is still a mystery.   In that sense even though it is in a future, it is being lived out in real time.   Sometimes I have a pretty good idea a week before the post what I will write of or sometimes even an idea for a series of weeks; other times Seneca simply refuses to go forward, points his finger imperiously at my keyboard, and says "Write this".

And thus, when I had one idea this entire week what I was going to write about but could not manage to start it for some reason, Seneca appeared on Wednesday night at 2230 and told me an entirely different story.

I will say this:  having at least four people running around in my head now - Seneca, Pompeia Paulina, Young Xerxes, Statiera - I never lack for a moment of conversation or thought.  In that sense, I am never "alone."

I do wonder what Lucilius will do with all of this when he finally gets the letters.