What Really Matters

I recently read a novel in manuscript and found so much that was good: the characters, the plot, the sentences. But I felt something small but essential missing. A crack in the purpose of the journey. I told my friend that I liked the places her character went to, but I wasn't deep-down sure why was it being taken.

A few weeks later, she wrote me back to tell me that she figured out the missing essence. Her answer was simple, but it gave me chills. I know now her characters may lift off the page.

The feelings that bring a character alive can sometimes be right in front of us. Or under our skin. Speaking recently to a group about BORROWED NAMES, I was asked why I chose the title. I explained how Sarah Breedlove, who grew up calling the white women she worked for Ma'am while they called her Sarah, claimed the name Madam before the name she took when married. Rose Wilder Lane also changed her last name when she married, and she kept it after divorce. Marie Curie, who hated publicity about her personal life and knew the radium she studied might be endangering her health, wanted to keep her name out of newspapers, so when going to hospitals registered under her mother's or sister's name.  There was a lot of hiding, changing and borrowing, but a listener in the audience pointed out, "And you borrowed your own feelings and put them into the women."

Yes, we borrow from our characters, and take from our selves, when writing poetry or fiction. Sometimes a feeling missing from our work is right in front of us, clear as a shadow, and perhaps also that inexact. But some of what makes us grieve, hurt, or celebrate does and can go into the writing to deepen, elevate, or point a way through a story that's never just one person's story, but the reader's, the writer's, and those imagined on the page.