Yancey Anderson
asked
Nick Harkaway:
Once you are done with a book, do the characters still linger with you? It happens when I read a book, and have always wondered how it is for the writer.
Nick Harkaway
Yes, for a while. It's curious who - Humbert Pestle still occasionally jostles me and wants me to tell his side of the story of TGAW, for example. It's one of the interesting thing about TV and movie deals - there's always a clause about sequels, and you think: "maybe I could just outline that and someone else could do the hard work..."
But the other thing that happens is that new characters come along and evict the old ones. Lester Ferris et al has given way in my mind to Constantine Kyriakos and the cast of the novel I'm writing now. On a practical, maybe a psychological or even a neuroscientific level, there's a limit to the number of fully-fleshed identities I can carry in my head. So people get phased out, and then they exist in the book, and if I want them I have to feel my way back to who they were and how they've evolved while I was away. Which is weird.
But the other thing that happens is that new characters come along and evict the old ones. Lester Ferris et al has given way in my mind to Constantine Kyriakos and the cast of the novel I'm writing now. On a practical, maybe a psychological or even a neuroscientific level, there's a limit to the number of fully-fleshed identities I can carry in my head. So people get phased out, and then they exist in the book, and if I want them I have to feel my way back to who they were and how they've evolved while I was away. Which is weird.
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