Where do characters come from?

Characters as parts of ourselves we don’t fully understand.

First, happy publication month to my new book, Out of the Woods which you can order with free shipping inside Australia, here.

Characters are strange things. You have a sense of them, almost the way you have the bodily sense of a person you live with — the way you know what it is like to be in their presence, even without exchanging any words. Without getting all woo-woo about it, it’s like characters have their own energy.

I wouldn’t necessarily say I always have a physical description of my characters close at hand, but I irrefutably have a sense of their physical being. Characters start to feel real to me when they seem to take up a space in my mind. I don’t so much think about them, but they occur to me from time to time when I am doing other things. Sometimes there are images, but more often than not there are flashes — I can almost see them, except not quite. They don’t seem to have a totality. To me, characters are like ghosts — sometimes the more I try to grasp them, to make them solid and concrete the more they evade me.

In some ways, the ghostly and inchoate nature of characters in my mind is the reason they need to be brought to life in words. It’s language that is life-giving to them.

When I thought about writing this piece, what I initially thought was that perhaps characters are simply a taxonomy of their own language. In other words they are simply word choices — the words they chose to describe the world around them, the language that populates their dialogues, and gives us a sense of how they speak. Of course, they are those things, but they are also something more abstract than that. They’re present, but ungraspable, like figures with their back turned to me.