When Your Characters Start Talking Back

A reflection on what happens when the story begins to question the storyteller

This piece was first published in CreativeWisconsin—my first literary publication, and a turning point for me as a writer, mostly because of the people I met along the way.

I’m sharing it here as a kind of beginning again.

Because the questions it asks—about characters, truth, and the relationship between writer and story—are the same ones I’m still living into. Maybe they always will be.

After ten years of working on this novel, I see the end in sight.

The photographs in this piece are by JR Korpa from Malaga, Spain.

Am I in search of my characters, or are they in search of me?

When I read Luigi Pirandello in high school, I had no idea what Six Characters in Search of an Author was about, but this morning it came back to me, asking to be revisited. Now, of course, I’ll have to pull it down from the bookshelf. That’s a wonderful thing about good literature: it doesn’t change, but we do, so it’s always a new experience.

The characters in my novel are not asking for a new author, but for a more honest version of the one they already have. They are constantly asking me, “Who are you anyway?” And “What on earth are you doing?”

One of the most challenging things for me as a writer is coming to know and accurately portray a character—or person—that lives in my head.

I’m wondering how many of the characters in literature that we have come to know and love over the years are based on real people in the author’s real life. Some own up to this, others do not, and still others use real people and place masquerades on them.

Maybe the challenge is not so much about the author giving life to the characters in a story as much as those characters seeking out who the author really is.

Because as I write, I oscillate, as my perception of the characters I’m writing about oscillates: Daughter, Seducer, Controller, Father, Mother, and the one True Friend.

These six characters are each, in their own way, exploring the relationship between reality and misconceptions—between truth and deception.

My characters keep complaining that they are unfinished. They are relentless in asking me to look deeper into what’s real and what’s not—into their relationships with one another, with God, and between art, life, and faith.

I’m not altogether certain my characters want me to remove their masks. If I do, I might have to remove my own.

Why, this has become meta-literature. A story within the story.

This week, I suggested to them that perhaps I am not capable of it—that I want to protect them—and that now they should be in search of a new author who will tell their story for them.

The story itself has become a metaphor, asking what is real and what is illusion within myself. Each of the characters is playing a character that is a part of me.

As an example, what is authentic about the protagonist? Everything is a performance with her and, therefore, a distortion of who she really is. How will we find her?

The characters are teaching me to discern their minds and hearts in the different ways they feel, think, and respond to what they experience.

They want me to make them more real, but they are also afraid of this. Truth can be both beautiful and ugly. Maybe too ugly. Where do I draw the line?

Each time I sit down, I have a fresh image of these people. They are not static, and yet words on the page make them seem so.

The protagonist is funny, but she has no humor. She has lost her humor. She is on a search to find her humor, but doesn’t know it. She wears many masks.

This urge toward depth pushes me beyond static images on the page into something more like a moving film, trying to comprehend her incessant movement from one place to another.

But the moving picture creates even more illusion than the individual images I have of her.

And what’s more dangerous than imagining the parts portrayed on the page form the whole person—or the whole story? Isn’t the true story—the testimony—of a life only truly known by God? Can I depend on my Muse—the Spirit—to reveal the deeper meaning to the reader?

I can only provide the diagram.

If I try to do more, I overwrite. The reader will fill in what is not written. We are collaborators, you and I—reader and writer.

As I am new each time I sit down to write, you are new. So the characters become new and are seen with new eyes.

We may never see the real character—or person.

We may never arrive at the synthesis of a life.

We need to be cautious, therefore, about jumping to conclusion—about characters, and about people. Art teaches us about life.

The characters help me see how superficial the assumptions are that I am constantly making—about them, people, God, about myself—as they see through the eyes of love, cynicism, and idealism.

They are hurt again and again. What draws us in, or pushes us away, or tempts us, should make us ask if we are able to know ourselves any better through those we have made assumptions about—and then let that help us create change and grow in understanding.

The very judgments we make about a character, or a person, prevent us from really getting to know them—and ourselves. And God.

This story I am writing, the images it creates, the emotions it draws out, the thinking it instigates—all depend on your own complexities and how you might interpret it at any given time.

You can never be sure that the images I create through the characters (or they through me, as the case may be) are any more truthful than your own.

If you were to ask my protagonist what’s important, she might say, “to realize our real home is found beyond the death of our real selves.”

But I don’t know that for sure. She’s just trying to figure things out.

I pick up my pen and try again.

__________

With gratitude to JR Korpa for the use of these photographs and Unsplash.