Head People and Pie

Lately, a fellow writer friend* asked me enviously if I’m one of those writers who has characters in my head demanding attention.  He said his characters were more likely to tell him to go watch TV and leave them alone.  It was the envy that surprised me.  It implied that writing is easier when you’re possessed by voices, like you’re just a crazy person getting paid for yielding to your psychosis.

It’s not like that.  Here’s what it’s like for me.  I have a character who just had a hand injury and lost a digit of his finger.  He needed medical attention but he was in a primitive situation, so I pictured a cauterization with the heated surface of an old-fashioned, cast-iron iron.  Clumsy.  Painful.  Not quite right.  I did some internet research about cauterizing wounds and went to bed.  The next morning, I’m awakened by pain in my left hand, vicarious, empathetic pain that runs as tension all the way up my arm, and I stir enough to realize my character can’t be left as he is.  He’s hurting.

So I get up and keep revising to fix his finger.

Blueberry Pie

I don’t understand where characters come from, or how they can become so distinct and real to me.  While I’m writing, I’m surprised by what they say and do, of course, but it doesn’t end there.  When I’m not writing, when, say, I’m washing dishes at the sink, I feel them in me, like I can feel my dad in me even though he’s been dead these three years now, or like I can summon the affection I had for my sixth grade teacher even without resurrecting a specific memory of her.  I especially feel my characters in me when they’re in an unresolved situation.  It bothers me, the way it bothers me when I have a misunderstanding with a friend, or when a stranger yells something crude at me from a passing car and I have no idea why.

The nice thing about characters is that I can fix their problems.  I can take them to resolution or deliberately decide not to.  The people in my real life are beyond my control.  I can’t erase the injustices they face, or force them to rethink their flaws.  Maybe that’s why I value having my head people, too, for the fictional closure they provide, for the way I can encapsulate them and keep them forever just as I like them.

Yesterday for a perfect holiday, I wrote to windchimes on the back porch, hung out with my family, walked in the forest, and baked pie.

* Okay, it was Tommy Greenwald.