A few weeks ago, I realized that everything my main character did was, well, out of character. Her motivations weren’t clear, her actions weren’t in line with her I knew her to be, and the whole plot felt like it was hanging by a single finger off the edge of a cliff. So, I decided that there was only one thing to do: I needed to interview my character.
Yup.
You read that right.
I actually took out a notebook and, like the journalist I could never be, asked my main character questions about her past, her fears, her motivations, and who she hopes to be by the end of the book. If you looked through my office door during that writing session, it would have looked like any other: coffee cup on my desk, laptop and PC pages open to different research websites, cat curled at my feet, and me scribbling away. But from my side of things, this was anything but normal.
As a poet, what I write comes from my perspective and my observations. The world filtered through my eyes and converted to language. There’s no need for a third party to interfere on that process.
The same cannot be said of writing a novel. I spent three hours interviewing a perspective that lives only in my head, but by the time I was finished, the person that emerged on those pages was dynamic and interesting. Her fears are not mine and she views the world through a much different window than I do. But what this process taught me, more than helping me course correct my plot, was that writers inhabit a uniquely personal space wherein their characters reside. At once a part of them, but completely different. Somewhere along the way, the line between author and character is established and then blurred.
Writers inhabit a uniquely personal space wherein their characters reside.”
As I sat interviewing a woman convinced of her own insanity, her words came as naturally as my own. My skepticism bumped up against her ignorance, and her anger flared at the questions that challenged her world view. And yes, I actually spent three hours talking to myself (something my main character would find highly concerning), but what I found was that liminal space where writer and character meet.