It Ain’t Always Pretty, To Get This Close…To Your Characters

I’ve been sitting in the same position so long my arse has gone to sleep. I’m playing the music through my headphones so loud my ears are going to hurt when I’ve finished.

But the music helps. It blocks out the world, the room I’m sitting in. The other people in the house know I’m just going to look blankly at them in they come in and try to talk to me. It’s a clear message I’m writing. It also makes me feel alive. Loud music – strong emotion.

It’s a strong emotion day. This is an intense scene I’ve been writing today. I’ll be exhausted when I’ve finished. Emotionally spent. I’ll drag myself out into the sunshine and lie down on the grass, staring up at the sky and feeling the real world seep slowly back into my bones.

Do other writers get this involved in the lives and character’s emotions? I don’t know and it wouldn’t make any difference if I did. Today I’m working on a short story – it doesn’t have a title yet; I’m just thinking of it as Michaela and Trisha’s story. That says it all, just for now.

Michaela and Trisha. I know these two characters – women – so well now, I can practically put on their lives and emotions like a second skin.

So when I’ve spent the last three days writing about them going through a really difficult time, I feel it almost like my own pain. It’s not my pain – my own life is just fine and dandy, but theirs isn’t right at the moment, and writing it is turning into one intense experience.

I can see them in my mind as I write. I can see them looking at each other as though I’m a peeping tom behind the window, or I can look at Trisha from Michaela’s eyes or at Michaela through Trisha’s. I can see what they see, and I feel what they feel because that’s the only way I can find out what it is, what is going on in the story, what actions and reactions are appropriate.

There’s not a hell of a lot of distance going on in this writer/character relationship. Is it always like this? Pretty much, yes. I move in and out of my characters’ heads, their environments, their bodies, as needed to know what is going on. I can watch them as if on a movie screen in my mind, or I can climb right inside and be part of that movie playing in 3D and technicolour and surround sound inside my head.

So today is hard. Because Michaela and Trisha – I’ve become awfully fond of them. They’ve become sufficiently well developed as characters that I can put them in any given situation and watch them act perfectly in, well in character. And because I like them so much, I’ve been feeling it all right along with them.

Damn but they better hurry up and make up. A writer crying over her own characters is just not a pretty thing.

Filed under: Writing Journal