It can happen like this:
You think about them when you’re apart, but you are not in love.
You worry about their behaviour when you’re not looking, fret about them in your absence, but they are not your wayward children.
Sometimes you do fall in love with them - just a little. Sometimes you feel responsible for their actions, as if you birthed them and brought them up and the world will judge you by their behaviour.
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It’s understandable. You spend the day locked in each other’s company. It’s intense, all that together-time. In long stretches, when the only voices you hear, the only people you speak to, are figments of your imagination, it’s no wonder the edges of reality and fiction start to blur.
Some writers invest so fully in characters they appear to take on a life of their own. In her life of Charles Dickens, Claire Tomalin speaks of his creations as ‘so finely accurate that he seems to be watching something taking place before his eyes as he writes’. A Victorianist colleague tells me Dickens would go out of his way to avoid meeting his fictional characters in the street. It’s an apocryphal tale, but a credible one.
In a study published in 2020, researchers from Durham University’s ‘Writers’ Inner Voices’ project surveyed 181 professional writers; 63 per cent of respondents said they heard their characters’ voices, and 61 per cent reported characters who ‘acted independently’ with some ‘exhibiting an atypical degree of independence and autonomy’. Nearly a third engaged in dialogue with their own creations, while 20 per cent reported sensing a character occupying the same physical space as them.
It might sound like psychopathology, but for many writers, it’s just part of the process. I know my characters are not real in any physical, tangible sense, but I believe in them – and like feeding the cat or watering plants, I worry about leaving them unattended for too long.
Well drawn characters feel fleshed out enough to step off the page because as readers, we fill their gaps with our own experiences. To write, we must turn this performance inside-out, a contortionist’s act of reaching towards suspension of disbelief while maintaining toe-contact with credibility. Each major character brings a set of vicarious triumphs, sulks and griefs to endure, another layer of method writing to work through. Does it hurt? Sometimes. Is it worth it? Absolutely. After all, if a writer doesn’t invest deeply in their characters, why should a reader?
Writing fiction requires the stamina of a professional care-giver and the emotional investment of a foster parent. We must create, nurture and let go. Even when I think I’m holding a character at arm’s length, the emotional proximity can surprise me. I once took enormous pleasure writing the scene killing off a protagonist’s sidekick: reading it back later, I burst into tears of guilt. One narrator had such deeply sensory experiences of place and idiosyncrasies of voice that I found it hard to shake them off when the book was finished.
As the Durham study notes, ‘over a third of writers reported experiencing their characters’ voices after having finished working on the narrative in which they appeared… In a few cases…the characters persisted to such an extent that they affected or interfered with the writer’s new projects.’ Some voices just don’t want to be silenced.
Writers can be haunted by their creations, visited by them in dreams, entered by them like spirit vessels. We walk with them, see and taste the world as they do, channel their words and feelings. We like to think of characters as props in our theatres of imagination, but we’re often worked by them like puppets. Not only can a strong character speak, and answer back, but they can also misbehave. They might derail the plot, show up where they shouldn’t be, argue against a point they were meant to agree with or radically alter their appearance.
What happens when a character decides to rebel? In my novel Eden I decided to experiment with how far a fictional character’s autonomy might take them. My model is one of Ernest Hemingway’s strongest women, Catherine Bourne, the antagonist of his posthumously-published The Garden of Eden.
Catherine is desirable and quick-witted, spiky and awkward. When she poses too great a challenge to her husband she is shut down, making way for a compliant replacement. Hemingway struggled with The Garden of Eden, producing a great sprawling mass of manuscript, very little of which remains in the published version. He shelved the book several times, returning to it in bursts between other projects. Did he wonder what Catherine got up to while he wasn’t looking? Having created such a wilful character, could he really expect her to sit on the sideline, waiting for his return?
No. In my treatment, Catherine becomes increasingly self-aware, developing an alarming level of autonomy. Testing the boundaries of her world she realises, like the undeceived prisoner released from Plato’s cave, that she is living in a fiction. While Hemingway stalls the book that contains her, busying himself with Across the River and Into the Trees or The Old Man and the Sea, Catherine continues to grow and develop, question and challenge.
Noticing Hemingway’s neglect, she visits him in the night, a succubus, forcing him to pay attention. When he picks the book up again she influences his creative decisions; when thwarted, she acts up, playing on his bad memories and fears. As Hemingway’s vitality and grip on reality wane, Catherine’s power waxes. When Hemingway dies, The Garden of Eden is unfinished and Catherine’s fate is in the hands of his editors. Or is it?
Can our creations carry on without us? What if they wrote their own endings? Writers must beware of downing tools: who knows what our creations are up to when we aren’t looking?
Eden by Sonia Overall is published by Weatherglass Books
