Where Are A Novelist S Characters Born

Where Are A Novelist's Characters Born?

Have you ever been haunted by a character, one who inhabits your imagination for days, months or years? Acquiring a life of his own, he leaps from the page and burrows inside us.

Think of Dickens’ Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge or Shakespeare’s King Lear or Macbeth? And then, of course, more recently, Hannibal Lector bursts from the mind of the novelist Thomas Harris and frightens us from the screen in the movie The Silence of the Lambs

Where did these characters come from? And what makes them so vivid that we carry them in our psyches for years? It’s not enough to say that they arise from the imagination of their creators.

Maybe there is a clue in the thoughts of one of my favorite authors, Robertson Davies. (Deptford Trilogy, The Cornish Trilogy)

“Unless the writing rises from the only true fountain of inspiration—and the Unconscious has shown itself to be not timely, but timeless—it will not be first rate.”

As writers, we may plot the life and actions of a character to our heart’s content. We may apply intellectual reason to the creation and birth of a character, but it will be to no avail. Because, when it comes right down to it, the only thing that matters is where that character comes from within the writer. If we try to create him by rational thought alone, he is almost certain to fall flat and be easily forgotten.

So what’s so special about the unconscious mind? That’s where creative psychic energy resides. According to Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, the artist (writer) has unusual access to the realms of the subconscious and all the creative energy it contains. Although we are usually unaware of it, our unconscious dream life continues even when we are going about our daily business. Those fantasies float up unbidden to the surface of the conscious mind of creative writers or artists. When he or she is doing some mundane task like shopping, one of those haunting characters may be born right in the aisle between the cereal and the detergent.

Does that writer rush home and write down everything that has emerged from the unconscious and then present it to the world as art? Hardly. That’s only the beginning. She may go deeper into the realms of the collective unconscious – a sort of vast and completely disorganized library, which contains all the images, thoughts and energies Of all mankind from time immemorial. Plenty of material there to shape characters who live on in us! They stay with us because they are ‘made’ of ancient material we all share as human beings.

I’ve sometimes been asked how could you possibly create such a character as The Florist in Conduct in Question? Such a question is usually accompanied by an uneasy sidelong glance. Perhaps I’m still trying to justify myself.

In Conduct in Question, the first in the Osgoode Trilogy, we meet the Florist, a sadistic murderer with an artistic flair, who believes he is called to judge the worthiness of his victims. When I was out for a walk on a beautiful spring day, I asked myself, what sort of person do I fear most? I soon realized it was of someone who took extreme pleasure in doing physical or mental harm to another. A joyful sadist if you like. But how to make him grow beyond a cardboard devil, who might be easily dismissed or laughed at?

To create a real devil, I think you must give him real human characteristics. Then we cannot deny he is a part of us. The Florist senses a lack of compassion within himself. Longing for it, he addresses his mother. I know what the word compassion means. But what does it feel like? Miraculously, even the Florist has a fleeting moment of redemption, when he does experience compassion. Loving art, The Florist labors to create the lyrical lines of the painter Matisse, as he carves human flesh. He takes his task of judging the worthiness of his victims with utmost seriousness. Sound mad enough a Devil for you? But with these human touches, he cannot be so easily dismissed.

Back to Robertson Davies who writes,

“But I know that there is one thing he (the Devil) is: he is a personal element in everybody’s nature, and he may be defined as everything that a man or woman condemns, detests, and is certain that he or she is not.

Is that the answer? The Devil is in all of us to one degree or another. Most of us succeed in keeping him under wraps in the unconscious depths. But we cannot deny he is there. Have a look at Conduct in Question and see the results of one writer’s attempt to capture him from down below and put him on the page.

BONUS : Where Do You Find The Time?

I am often asked, “How do you it? Where do you find the time to work a full time job and also write books?” The answer is simple. I make the time. However simple the answer might be, actually doing it can be quite difficult.

I get up at 5:15 every morning. The first thing I do is turn on my computer, and log into my office. I am the network administrator for an international shipping company. That means I have to make sure everything is working properly before anyone else logs into the system. I do what I need to do there, and then I exercise. Yes, that’s right, sit-ups, touching my toes (which I can still do!) buttock tucks, the whole nine yards. After that, I get myself ready for work.

Without fail, I meditate before I have breakfast. I credit my meditation practice with training me to have the concentration I need to write. After I eat, I leave for work.

I put in a full day, doing what network administrators do. Computers are my life at the office. I do anything and everything that needs to be done to keep an office of more than fifty people running smoothly. We also have international users that remotely log into our network. Part of my job is to make sure they are connecting properly, too.

Once I get home, I have some dinner. Then, I start my writing workday. Weekday evenings, I try to put in a few hours at the computer before going to bed. If I need help shifting out of the problems of my workday, I use music. I have a Bose Sound Machine and wireless headphones that help me shut out the world and get into my writing space. I reread a page or two of what I last wrote and hope that the next line will come. It usually does.

The lion’s share of the writing happens on weekends. I usually spend at least twelve hours on Saturday and Sunday at my computer. Sometimes, it can be longer. On Monday morning, the cycle starts over again. Oh, yes, I took a week’s vacation to work on Take Me There. I had an April 15th deadline.

I lost some ground last February when I got the flu and couldn’t write if my life depended on it! I had a fever of 103.4, the highest fever of my adult life! To catch up, I put in nine consecutive twelve to fifteen hour days working on my manuscript. I only stopped to go back to work on Monday, and to do the blogging week for Romantic Inks. Come Saturday, I will be back in the harness.

Now comes the real question! How do I do it? As I’m writing this, I’m thinking no one is going to believe I keep this schedule. But I do. I’ve been doing it for almost two years now, since I signed my first contract with Kensington. Once I hit the two year mark in June, I will have written three novels and two novellas budgeting my time as I do. I haven’t missed a deadline yet, not even when my mother passed away last June. I came home from the funeral with page proofs waiting for Sins and Secrets. I plunged in, read and corrected them.

There is a single driving force behind how I manage this. I am a writer. That is different than being an author. Being an author is an occupation. Being a writer is a vocation.

The intangible something inside that compels me to write is not at all comfortable. The words don’t start in my mind. They seem to well up from my chest. Sometimes it feels like an alien is about to burst out. I fully expect one day Sigourney Weaver will show up in her Ripley costume, gun in hand, ready to take me out!

No matter how tired I am, and trust me, I do get tired, I have to write. The alien inside me needs to be appeased, or it will eat me alive! I am amused by the number of people who have said to me that someday, they’re going to write a book. The only way to write a book is to sit down and do it! Procrastination does not a novel make. It doesn’t matter if it’s a blank page, or a white screen from Microsoft Word on a monitor, it has to be filled with words. Those words are the writer’s responsibility. No one is going to do it for you. You have to do it yourself.

Of course, along with the fire that burns in the heart of a writer, there also has to be technical skill. To become a published author, you have to not only want to write, you have to be able to write. It astonishes me at times when I meet people who can’t put three sentences together in a coherent paragraph and expect to get published. The competition is extraordinary. You have to be good to get published. Period! End of story!

Talent notwithstanding, you have to also be willing to do what I’m doing. There aren’t many published authors these days who can make a living wage writing. Certainly, I’m not one of them, at least not yet. That’s why I get up at 5:15 everyday. I have to pay my bills.

So, to finally answer the question I’ve been asked so many times, that’s how I do it. My way isn’t for everyone. But it’s working for me. I have the books to prove it!