Sometime before I moved from Fort Lauderdale, I started working on yet another novel. In my lifetime, I've started dozens, and I've finished four. The first one was abysmal, good for little more than an object to prop under a broken table leg to keep it steady. The second and third showed promise, with a few shining ideas and interesting characters, but everything good about them had gotten hopelessly entangled in overwrought descriptions and far too many subplots for comfort. These, I would need to come back years later, when I had far more strength of will to rebuild and restructure than I do now. The fourth and last novel was actually pretty sound on all fronts, but because I'd been staring at it for 10 years of my life, I needed a second opinion. I'm in the process of obtaining such a second opinion from 10 other people in the form of 10 friendly neighborhood beta readers. But in the meantime, I didn't know how to live my life without telling stories.
This newest tale came bubbling out of my brain one evening when I had absolutely no time to entertain it. But I couldn't help myself. It's like it was spilling out of my ears and running across my floor to soak into my carpet, and if I didn't try to collect it on the page, I'd lose it forever. So despite having to get up and go to work early the next morning with absolutely no time to indulge in random acts of writing, I sat down at my computer and let my fingers go dancing and kerplunking across my keyboard. A whole world began to form. I filled it with people I suddenly cared about quite fiercely, and words that alternately amused and upset me. As it came together, I realized that it was a story I was excited to tell, because it felt unexpected and unique. Even if I wasn't the first person to think of all of the elements I was employing, I felt like maybe I was the first one to combine them together this way, and that felt utterly thrilling. For many nights after that one, I worked on the novel like a woman possessed, just burning with ideas. Then, sometime after I made the move up-state to Tallahassee, I sputtered to a halt and could write no more.
It didn't make sense for me to flail ineffectually upon reaching this portion of the story. This is the part I'd been waiting for. Every moment, every plot twist, every line of dialogue had just been a step I had to take to lead me here, finally, to the introduction of this character I'd become almost smitten with in the course of dreaming him up. And now that I finally led my heroine into his part of the world, I didn't know how to introduce him, or what to say about him when I did.
I stopped writing on the novel for a while and worked on other things. From time to time, I'd come back and sit down in front of the computer, calling up the Word document where my new character was waiting just off-set for his cue. Ultimately, I'd end up going back and re-reading what came before, monkeying with some descriptions and giving some unnecessary adverbs the quick and brutal death they deserved. But I made not a letter's worth of progress towards my guy coming onto the scene. Something about this character had rendered me speechless.
I ended up getting to the point where thinking about trying to conjure him up made me feel vaguely nauseated. My head pulsated with the memory of how much I'd wanted him to come into being, and my stomach ached with the guilt of having abandoned all efforts to make it happen. The only thing I can really compare it to, strangely enough, is that feeling I used to get in high school when, after having idealized some poor, unsuspecting heartthrob past the point of being a plausible human being, I could no longer bear the notion of trying to approach him and interact with him like he was just an average guy who ate, slept, farted, and changed his clothes. I can't tell you now if that's because I no longer knew how to see the boy through all the myths I'd created around him or if I just didn't want to anymore, but I suppose that's irrelevant to the matter at hand. All that mattered was that my fictional character was as unattainable as the guy with the blazingly azure eyes in my Physics class who had scant knowledge of my existence.
Long after I had gone through all of the stages of grief over this failing and finally arrived at acceptance, I hit upon the answer. At the time, I was reading American Gods in my bathtub, draped over the rim with a highlighter cap in my mouth while I marked through the most intriguing bits in bright gold. Every now and then, I traded the highlighter for a pen, marking down observations in the margins that were alternatively keenly analytical and just plain silly.
Around page 50, I got hung up on how Shadow's character had been revealed. I flipped back through the pages, admiring how every detail spoke volumes about this man, whereas a lengthy exposition trying to concisely describe his existence upfront would have lacked the same effectiveness. He wasn't explained, he just was. I really felt like Neil Gaiman knew this character. Thought his thoughts. Knew what he smelled like, how he cut his hair, and what his favorite TV show was when he was a kid. Sensed him in a way that was far more telling than a recitation of objective historical facts could be. And because Neil Gaiman knew his character so intimately, I felt like I did. This was someone whose fate I was keenly invested in, a mere 50 pages into the book. I was worried about him, upset for him, and admired him by turns. Even having read his story once before, I was caught up in his life all over again and fretting like I had no clue what was to come. And it occurred to me that this was the kind of character I wanted to write. This was the only way I could write the man I'd dreamed up for my own book and feel like I'd done justice to the idea of him nestled inside my head.
The answer was so obvious that I would've never thought of it without help, because that's how these things work. I needed to know my character like Neil Gaiman knew Shadow Moon. Shadow hadn't been scattered, willy-nilly, across a page in the hopes that he would make sense to someone someday. The details that made him believable had been spread out through the chapters with the deliberate care of a man spreading peanut butter across the crunchy surface of his toast. No globs and splatters. He'd been revealed to us slowly and carefully: the words that resonated in his mind, the memories that made him happy, his mannerisms when he was concerned, his precise handwriting and his cautious reactions to things that might make another man exclaim and react impulsively. Whether Gaiman plotted him out in advance or his clever brain just happens to work that way, he wove an intricate and subtle image through the pages of the book that made Shadow seem so real that I had to keep reading about him long after my bathwater went tepid and my fingers and toes had became hideously pruny.
So before I sit down again and start stabbing at keys on my laptop, trying to force my character into existence prematurely, I'm going to take him to lunch. Not literally, mind. I'm not that crazy. Yet. One day this week, I'm going to take my moleskin somewhere peaceful during my lunch break and I'm going to write about him until I know him well enough to make him live in my story instead of just existing as a prop for the main character to interact with. Chances are, I won't actually write anything that will make its way into the finished product, but whatever scene or story or details that feel authentic to me when I consider who and what he is. It could be that I'll pen out his family history, or about how he copes with an upsetting event in his life, or how he interacted with other children when he was a boy. It might be something that can be woven into the novel, it might not be, but the bottom line is, it just has to be something that makes him real to me. Because ideas are a fine thing, but people are much more interesting. And whereas some characters just spring into existence, fully-formed, as if they've just been waiting for you to notice them, sometimes the really special ones take a little more care.
Hopefully, if I show my character that I care, he'll take that cautious step into the scene I've set up for him. And my fingers will once again find their rhythm on the keys.
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