Where Do They Come From?

In Zen in The Art of Writing, one of the best little books about writing I know of, Ray Bradbury said that when people ask him how he gets ideas for stories he tells them, the problem is not “getting” stories, the problem is not tripping over them when he gets out of bed in the morning. I love that and I know what he means. Sometimes I wish I could turn my brain off long enough to finish what I am working on before another bright idea shows up.

I had dinner with my friend Lisa last night. She was one of my first readers for the latest version of The Old Mermaid’s Tale and she loves it. We were talking about web cams and I mentioned the web cam in Erie that shows French Street. In my novel Baptiste takes Clair to a little restaurant on French Street on their first date. Actually within a block of the web cam. (The idea of “Baptiste” and “web cam” even being in the same paragraph cracks me up.) Lisa said she absolutely loved those two characters and said “where did they come from?”

What a difficult question for a fiction writer to answer! Where do they come from indeed? And how do they become so real and so alive once you commit them to the page? It is a very great mystery to me.

I think the telling of stories is probably the oldest form of entertainment known to man - bearing in mind that procreation was once more of an imperative than entertainment. I can imagine ancient people, back from a hard day on the veldt, sitting around camp fires and saying “there was this guy who...” and the first character was born.

I have this sense of another dimension filled with characters. I don’t know where they came from but if God made us (through many millenia of tinkering with the original design) why couldn’t s/he make a world full of characters? My sense is that they live in there with these incredible stories inside them and are ever watchful for a willing scribe in our dimension to stop, listen and record what they have to say.

Writers often say that, upon re-reading something they just wrote, they think “where the heck did that come from?” I’ve had that happen a lot. I think the characters do it - they just use my fingers. Writers will sometimes talk about an unruly character who goes off and does his/her own thing and pretty much screws up the writer’s plan for the story. I’ve had that happen, too. “Hey, you! Get back here.” Doesn’t happen. Certain characters have minds of their own. When Clair hauled off and punched Karen in the nose nobody was more surprised than I was.

One of the best characters I ever created is Ruby in My Last Romance. And all I can say is she just showed up one day and said “hey, write about me.” The only credit I can take for her was not dropping my pen while she was using it. I have a long ago memory of seeing a blonde woman in a pale blue convertible with a pink silk scarf wrapped around her hair and dark glasses driving down the Strand in Galveston. When I pulled along side her she turned toward me and I realized she was a lot older than I thought - but still gorgeous. Maybe that’s when Ruby was born. I don’t know.

Or maybe Ruby put that memory in my brain along with the rest of her story. Characters can be sneaky. You have to keep an eye on their shenanigans or they can get you into trouble.

Thanks for reading.