I love and admire many things about Madeleine L’Engle’s books, but what might impress me most is the way she creates a constellation of characters. She invents a whole world inhabited by an array of people, and her novels rise up out of this world, with characters that crossover from one book or series into others.
Meg and Calvin grow up and become characters busy in the background of books that feature new young people. One such person is Zachary, who intersects with both Vicky and Polly and is one of several connections between the Austin stories and the Murray stories. Such intersections give the world L’Engle creates depth and substance. They make it real.
Any writer of fiction must think about world building, but for L’Engle, the world is not bound by the pages of a single book or even the volumes of a series. Her characters simply exist, and they come in and out of books just like real people meander in and out of our real lives.
L’Engle is certainly one of the writers who has most influenced me, and I aim to follow her lead and craft constellations of characters who my readers will stumble upon when they aren’t looking for them, and these unexpected encounters will make the characters and their worlds more real. I’ve had this intention for a long time, since I started writing fiction, but I actually wrote the first such encounter this week. I won’t spoil the surprise–part of the fun is that “Hey, what are you doing in this book?” moment–but I do hope that putting a fully developed person that readers will be happy to bump into in the background of a different story will enrich the experience of my own constellation, small for now, but growing.