Not Exactly People

"Writers aren't exactly people. They're a whole lot of people trying to be one person."
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

It could be said that I have writing in my blood. I've grown up around storytellers; I've been writing since early in my childhood when the inspiration of Tolkien's three-book masterpiece served as enough of a catalyst to launch my own love of the English language. Now, even after years of experience and countless stories and miserable attempts at poems—and even a few scripts—I'm still relatively new to my chosen trade. I've had no novels published, just a few short stories in some small magazines; nevertheless, though the outlook on my future as a writer may sometimes seem grim, my resolve to continue submitting work has never wavered.

In my quest to pen publishable material, I've gathered quite a few passengers along the way.  A writer of prose is nothing without his or her characters. Even someone who chooses to devote their endeavors to nonfiction must craft their family, friends, and acquaintances into characters that can make a reader laugh and cry, rage and bleed with empathy. Characters are often the vehicle through which humans come to some sort of understanding with the literature that they read. Without a mortal element present in those works, the text may seem too alien for our picky palates.

One of my English professors likes to stress the connection that we, as readers, make to the characters we "meet" in our readings. "What," he always asks us, "causes you to identify with the people in any given story? They're nothing more than ideas—marks of ink on a plain page that, through the mechanics of language, manage to conjure an image for us." These people are our friends, our families—even ourselves, at times. Yet what enchantment brings them to life? Like Frankenstein's monster, they are stitched together from any number of sources. Authors draw their inspiration from everything around them, as well as the secret gardens of ideas that they cultivate with such jealousy, carefully guarding the delicate fruits from others until the day comes when they are just ripe and can be submitted to the pleasure or displeasure of other readers to which they may not be so intimately familiar. Are characters, then, birthed from this sacred place and emerge like more perfect versions of Adam and Eve? Or are they truly "monsters", liminal constructs that are jolted to life through the lightning-strike of a pen? What, indeed, makes them so "human"? If they are, what makes them acceptable enough that they manage to avoid the "uncanny valley" into which so-called creepy human parallels are tossed with such disgust?

This, I believe:  characters escape this chasm because, as much as they can be, they are human. Like homunculi, they are a representation of the author who creates them—perhaps even a portion of their master or mistress' soul.

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Among friends and family, I'm infamous for my ability to archive random, usually useless facts in my long-term memory. Yet even with this tendency, I can't count how many facts I've learned in school and promptly forgotten—things that passed in one ear and out the other without even a smidgen of my attention. Mathematical facts and formulas seem to be the bane of my existence in this fashion. No matter how well I may grasp them for the few weeks we utilize them in class, I'm sure to forget them as soon as we move onto another concept.

This seems to be yet another sign that my intended calling was English, rather than one of the hard sciences… or even one of the softer ones. Instead of mathematics, my mind chooses to fill itself with details of the lives belonging to people that have never truly existed. Over the course of the years I have been writing, I've created something in excess of thirteen hundred characters; as I've also created an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of them all, I don't come up with this number arbitrarily. Most of this spreadsheet I have been able to fill in from memory, without ever consulting any of the pieces I've written with these characters. They've been my companions since childhood, and remain so to this day. Through the times in my past when some of my friends have proven false and disloyal, my characters have never betrayed me. They may prove difficult at times—but they are a part of me, and that is to be expected.

The process by which I create them varies. Some of them appear fully formed in my head as though they existed, complete, somewhere else before arriving there. Others have been very obviously and very carefully constructed from an idea seeded in my head by something else—or even by the necessity for a particular kind of character to fill a gap in a story. Whatever the nature of their birth, they grow and change as I write with them. In some cases, I can predict the ways in which their personalities will adjust to the situations they find themselves in. Yet at times, and more often than is perhaps normal, they surprise me with new responses.

I am perfectly aware that my characters do not actually exist. Though I am a writer—and I have heard some people speculate that we are all insane—I am not so unhinged and delusional as to think that my creations are real. They are characters, personas that I can adopt during writing in order to bring a new perspective into play. Nevertheless, they are "alive" and well inside my head. They insist on having a hand in the creation of their histories and futures. Whether I like it or not, there is a constant, running commentary on everything that I write. Perhaps this does make me crazy; but I know enough writers who share such a phenomenon that, at the very least, I am not alone.

Quite literally, in that sense, I am not. With the voices of my characters perpetually nagging at me in my skull, it's impossible to get a moment's peace.

But at least writing is a release for those voices. Maybe people who are said to have multiple personalities are simply writers that never learned to write. Creators who never learned the secret of letting their voices out in controlled doses in order to keep a lid on the madness, to keep a grip on true reality. Since I allow my characters to interact with those of other authors that I know on a personal basis, I have an even greater capacity to allow them at least a semblance of freedom without losing myself in a battle of identity.

[ + ]

All of them are related to me in some fashion. If I sit down with a list of them before me, I can identify which aspects of them correlate with my own personality quirks, prejudices, loves, desires, fears, and secret yearnings. Characters are intensely personal to me as a result. In some fashion, each one of them is a twisted image of myself. Exposing them to dangers and to the ridicule of readers sometimes feels all too vulnerable. At times, I'm afraid to admit to some of the things that they have done—some of the things that I may want to do, or that I fear may be interpreted as such. But in this way at least I can confront those parts of myself that I might be ashamed of, so that rather than experimenting with potentially disastrous choices, I can play them out in an environment where I control all of the variables.

People have always fascinated me—and I'm human, so it stands to reason that my favorite topic is myself. I know that I have the capability to become someone cruel. Someone wicked, even evil, and utterly selfish. I, like everyone else, have the capability of succumbing to an addiction or a vice that could potentially destroy me. That is the reason that so many of my characters are "broken" in some fashion by their pasts; the psychology of someone who has taken a fall, for whatever reason, fascinates me. While I make a point to ensure that I never become one of those people, some of my oldest and most well-loved characters fall into that category. They are addicts, and sufferers of mental illnesses, afflicted with insecurities and old pains that just won't quite leave them alone. And perhaps I am a sadist:  torturing them is pleasing. Plotting new ways to put my characters in danger and harmful situations is one of my favorite pastimes. I like to watch them squirm; I like to see how those with particular personality traits will react to any given situation.

It makes me feel, in a more simple phrasing, like a god. And that in and of itself is an addicting sensation.

[ + ]

Through my use of my characters, I have succeeded in crafting personas for myself. Those who know me well have come to recognize them, even going so far as to interact with them both in the capacity of characters and as facets of myself.

My two oldest and most well-developed began as extrapolations of certain aspects of myself. Zimpar was my impulsiveness, my anger, my teenage angst when I hit puberty in middle school and my friends and I hated one another for the better part of a year.  Zipartas became my calmer, cooler side:  the calculating, perhaps manipulative one that, while largely unemotional, excels at playing other people for an emotional response in order to get what he wants. While they are far from representing my entire self, their existence has become integral to my own identity. My closest friends know them as well as I do, referencing certain moods of mine as belonging to one or the other. The two have expanded beyond their original boundaries to become something more. Something that seems, at its heart, almost human.

They have lives of their own, true. Stories. I'm perfectly aware of the fact that I am not them. Yet examining my own contrary and complex nature has become easier since I learned to categorize sections of myself within their existences. Indeed, my own girlfriend has done a similar thing with two of her own characters. Creating them years ago, utterly independent of the creation of mine, she and I arrived at the same result. Though explaining some of our quirks may have grown somewhat more complicated with the introduction of these aspects, it is also infinitely more rewarding.

With each of the characters that I create to populate my worlds and stories, I justify the right I have to call myself a god. And like every other author that has given a part of themselves over to a new life, it is these creations which may live on after my death.

It is my characters which may prove to be my key to immortality. Just as F. Scott Fitzgerald himself bought immortality through the lives his characters—those people that spent so many years trying to be him—perhaps I may be able to do the same. Their legacies will remain long after my own bones have turned into nothing more than worthless dust. Even when the spark of my own life has faded away, theirs will continue to burn as enchanted black marks on the pages of my soul.