Voices in Your Head: When Characters Won’t Leave You Alone
by Joseph Bentz
My response is yes, it is not only normal, but it was probably a sign that her story is working. If her characters were so flat that she never thought about them or identified with them at any time other than when she was writing, I would be far more worried. One of the joys of writing fiction is the creation of an alternate reality filled with people and places and events that become almost as real to us as the everyday reality in which we live.
At the university where I teach, some of my colleagues invite me to speak to their classes when they teach my novel, A Son Comes Home. The students talk to me about the people in the story as if they’re real. We probe their motives and their actions. Some students demand to know what happens to the characters after the novel ends, as if the characters are real people whose history I must have kept track of. When I say that I have no idea what happens to any of these people beyond the pages of the novel, some students look at me skeptically, as if I’m deliberately concealing information from them.
As a literature teacher, I also experience this same sense of “reality” of my favorite novels that I teach year after year. Huckleberrry Finn is not a real person? To me he is. Atticus Finish is made up? Hard to believe. Hamlet is not a flesh-and-blood person? He is only words that Shakespeare wrote on the page? You’ve got to be kidding.
I have worlds of people and dramatic moments swirling in my brain, some created by writers hundreds of years ago who could scarcely have imagined me experiencing their vision here in the twenty-first century. Now, as a novelist, I have the opportunity to create a few people and dramas of my own, and those visions now float around in the heads of readers I’ve never met. What a joy! That thought alone makes all the hassles and rejections and insecurities involved in writing fiction worth every minute.
