A couple of weeks ago I wrote about carrying my main character, Micah, around with me. I haven’t been doing as much of this as I would like partly because Micah is 11 and a lot of my life wouldn’t interest him at all: “What would Micah think of my department meeting?” is not a terribly interesting question. But I have been trying, and I do think the experiment is working. Though I have had very little time to write, Micah feels present to me, and, when time permits, I’m ready to bring him to life on the page.
In October, I had a wonderful opportunity to read from my novel to a group of colleagues. I enjoyed this very much and was struck afterwards by the fact that I will never read from this book for the first time again. I didn’t know where they would laugh, for instance, and now I do.
I especially enjoyed the Q&A that followed the reading, and one friend asked a really wonderful question about how much what the characters have read might help them. We talked in particular about A Wrinkle in Time: if Micah has read L’Engle, does he then use this text to help him navigate the confusing layers of time travel in his own life?
I’ve been thinking about this question off and on since the reading. It’s a question that challenges the line between author and character in that Micah can’t have read in a meaningful way anything I have not read. I can put books on his shelf (or his bed, where Micah actually keeps his most special books) that I have not read myself, but I can’t put those books in his world view.
Conversely, one could argue that every book I have read informed the crafting of my own book, but many of the books I have read would not interest Micah. Bright though he is, I know that he has not read Middlemarch. Once in an earnest mood he tried Oliver Twist, but he didn’t get past the first sentence. These books may have helped me shape my fictional world, but it doesn’t follow that they help Micah shape his real world.
This is all a long way of saying that I still don’t know what Micah has read. I do know that he likes to organize his books and even built his own bookshelf out of a box that formerly held one of Celia’s dolls. So, for now, I can’t really build the contents of Micah’s bookshelf into his character and his problem-solving skills, but I can write with confidence that the fact of the bookshelf and the organization it represents tells us quite a bit about who Micah is.
Sitting here now in my office, Micah likes how I have this semester’s books on a special shelf at my side, and he loves how I put each book back in its regular place when I’ve finished with it. He might notice that A Wrinkle in Time is already back with the children’s fiction, and if he were really here, I think he might pull it off the shelf, and I’m sure he would get well past the first sentence.