Books Have Minds of Their Own

Authors often make statements about their books wanting to be written or characters dropping fully formed into their minds, and I have generally found these sorts of statements annoying. You may feel like the character came to you as an already assembled entity, but really you have been busily assembling him yourself, even if you have been doing so beneath your own radar. Yet, now that I am spending more time writing fiction and thinking hard about writing fiction, I find that, indeed, my story does seem to have a life of its own.

I know, of course, that I make up the characters, and I decide what happens to them, but once those people exist in the fictional space that I've created, and once I've set certain experiences in motion for them, there is a logic, a mandate, an organic something or other that emerges.

I will explain with an anecdote. For quite a while, I have known what would be the main plot arc of my second book, but I hadn't given a lot of thought to the particulars. I was waiting for time and also for a sense of momentum. Slowly, as I thought more and more about what would happen in this book, that momentum began to build. I think of it as key pieces falling into place. I visited a place a couple of months ago, and in that place, I spotted a detail that I recognized right away as something that belongs in this book. I held on to that detail, waiting to decide how I would use it. As time passed, other details fell into place. Now, enough pieces are there to give me and the story the momentum it needs for me to really start writing, but all those pieces also demand certain treatments. In other words, the pieces out of which I will stitch together the book, all come with their own stories, and it is those stories that seem somehow outside my control.

So now, like so many authors, I find myself saying things like, "Silvia does X," as if Silvia is a real person with agency. I know she's not. I made her. But, yet, somehow she is real. I made her and then released her and now she sort of does have a life of her own. I couldn't, say, turn her into a vampire or a drunk because she is nether of those things: she has an identity that I created but that now exists on its own.

And as I work on the details of the plot for the second book, outlining chapters, I discover that I do have a sense of the story existing in some abstract, unwritten form. I will write it and give it shape, but it does exist, even without my words. Of course, no one will every know that unless I give the story words.

So I will.