I have just started writing a new novel. I’ve written one experimental chapter and have an outline. It doesn’t really seem right to call it a “novel” at this stage, or even to talk about it as a real thing yet. The story has been taking shape for a while –a few months or a few years, depending on how I count–like an out-of-focus picture that finally resolves into something recognizable. But I settled on the characters only a couple of weeks ago. They are newborns, in a manner of speaking. Even so, I already know them pretty well, though I will know them better later.
It’s kind of like the friends you meet at camp: the environment is so intense that you get to know each other quickly. It doesn’t matter that you only met yesterday. It’s like that with new characters. I just named them a few weeks ago and decided how old they are and worked out who is angry and who is responsible and what the alliances are and why, but already the four children I invented have lives that are greater than what I’ve dreamt up for them. Already they have wills and ways that are somehow beyond my ken.
So, this evening, although I don’t have time to write the next chapter, I thought it would be a good idea to check in on my characters. See if I need to adjust anyone. See if I know what comes next for them. And I realized they’ve been developing without me. While I’ve been working on other things and spending time with real people, these made-up people have been resolving into themselves.
I suppose this happened in the back corners of my brain, and I just didn’t notice, but I can’t help but feel that my characters have come to life, at least a little, and I wonder what they do when I’m not writing them. Think about the characters you’ve loved, whose stories you’ve read and re-read. You know what they would do in situations they never face in the books they inhabit. That is, you can imagine them outside the bounds of the worlds created for them.
I’m still discovering what this feels like as a writer. At the end of that chapter I’ve written–a chapter that will certainly be rewritten several times and that may well end up deleted altogether–I left my characters feeling more than a little lost, trying to settle in to a peculiar hotel. When I sat down this evening to check on them, they were still in the hotel where I’d left them, but they’d moved around. The oldest sister took off her shoes. The main character stared out the window. It’s as if when you paused a TV show, instead of freezing, the people on the screen kind of milled around and chatted and developed in small but meaningful ways while they waited for you to come back and push “play.”
Even though I’ve only just begun my relationship with these characters, already their unique personalities shape what I can imagine for them. That my characters aren’t quite where I left them means they’re real and it means their story is worth telling. I can’t wait to find out what they’ll do next.