When Characters Know They Are Fictional

A reprint of a post from November 2010.

Is there a Dimension where characters wait for authors to find them? 

I and all of my original characters say yes!  Just ask Elerde , the "darkly sensual mercenary"of my novel's back cover blurb.  He and the others from An Involuntary King have been my constant companions since a friend and I drew them out of their waiting place over forty years ago.  It has only been since I started to talk with other authors, such as Helen Hollick, that I started to have my suspicion that they existed somehow before I came along confirmed.  Now as I read Ursula K. Leguin's Lavinia, I discover a self-aware fictional character where the title character meets her creator Virgil and comes to understand that she and the events of Th Aeneid are fictional.

OK, I know there really aren't characters who sit around some sort of mystical place waiting to be introduced to our world where they remain long after their authors are gone... but I love the idea, so relax and bear with me.

Here is the concept: there is a dimension, fourth, sevemth, sixteenth, who knows? where fictional characters live until someone, a novelist, a poet, a playwright, reaches in and draws one or more out to put them in a work of literature.  Once they are in our world they persist without end, no matter what happens with the author, the book, the society.  Why do I say this?  Because to an author, or so I am told by so many of them, the characters are not under our control.  They are so real to us that we speak of characters refusing to go along with a plot twist or simply taking over and telling their stories themselves.  I go so far as to believe on some level my main characters actually live with me.  The king once had his own room.  And yes, my husband thought that was a fine thing.

Now for a long time I thought I was the only author to believe this nonsense, but then Helen Hollick and I talked about how her pirate, Jesamiah Acorne, came to be.  This hero of the Sea Witch Chronicles literally appeared before her on a British beach as she sat pondering the direction of her next artistic efforts.  She had been challenged to write something new, something with some magic of the paranormal  variety, and was walking alone thinking what to do.  She told me she started to get an impressions of a piratical rogue from the 18th century, and lo and behold, as she looked to the edge of the surf, there he was, his back to her, looking out to sea.  He had a blue ribbon tying up his hair, and as he turned she saw an earring with a tiny gold acorn and then a brilliant, saucy smile.  It was Capt. Jesamiah Acorne, real, perfectly aware he was fictional, but happy to have become part of our world.  And he is such a vivid and enjoyable character, so are we who have read his adventures.

Another author whose work I love, Ruth Sims, told me that when over a twenty year period she wrote The Phoenix her characters defied her absolutely, taking shape in spite of what she had originally planned for them.  The original Nick was an American Civil War era physician, courting a woman whose name Sims does not even remember,  who has a friend, an actor, named Kit.  By the end of the twenty years a time shift made it Victorian England and Nick and Kit were now the romantic couple.  Sims says she has no idea of how this came about, that she had little or no exposure to gay people nor had set out to write a gay love story, but Kit and Nick were not to be shoehorned into what they were not.  This mirrors exactly the conversation I had with my as yet unpublished book's heroine, Elisabeth von Winterkirche, who is a lesbian and be damned!

So it was particularly gratifying to me to listen to the conversation between the LeGuin novel's heroine and "The Poet", where the princess of Latia realizes that whether or not she ever truly existed, her effectual reality is as a minor character in a great poetic epic, The Aeneid.  The Poet is amazed to meet her and discover just what a well-rounded character she is, despite his short shrift in depicting her.  From this Lavinia concludes that not only is she fictional but the other characters, the settings and the events, are all "made up", like the woman warrior he tells her about.  This influences her awareness of all that happens about her, but she accepts the plot, which others call "fate", as "how it should be."

One reason I so enjoy the collaborative writing groups, ghostletters and ghostletters-tng, is that I have been able to take characters from my first novel and let them interact knowingly as fictional characters.  In one situation my Irish bard, O'Neill, explains to someone else's character in that brief story line, what it is like to experience an edit.  "'Tis a momentary sensation of shift, a shimmering where what you thought you knew and did changes, then shortly after you don't remember what had happened in the first place."  His companion asks if the experience is not more than a little disorienting.  He admits, "Aye, a wee bit of vertigo, but ye get used to it, so ye do."

And of course he knows and I know who is doing that editing, and it ain't me.