Humor me, I’m sick. I saw my doctor yesterday, and I do indeed have the flu. Bummer. I’m on strict bed rest, and I’m incredibly bored because I’m on the mend (it’s been most of a week already) and the cough meds my doctor prescribed are basically magical. Since I’m tired of Netflix and browsing social media, it’s Unpopular Opinion time.
Okay, this one probably isn’t all that controversial, but here goes: I don’t view my fictional creations (characters, setting) as fully formed beings who talk to me and have free will of their own. I mean, they came from my head. I don’t buy into the culture of “I just write what they tell me to.”
I know some of that isn’t really serious, and I take a lot of it as joking. But honestly, it’s sometimes draining when the conversation implies that these are living, breathing people. I think that’s partly because I’m a bit more concrete and a bit more literal. It isn’t that I don’t understand it; it’s more that’s not really how my mind works.
But here’s why it’s really important to me to recognize and understand my writing as an extension of my own brain: This is how I process trauma and other things that I cannot put into words in everyday conversation. Writing is a therapeutic process, and I need it fully grounded in my own reality in order to use it as a tool for healing.
Here’s a good example. When I wrote Passing on Faith, I was in a horrible place, emotionally and spiritually. I’d only just finally come out as bisexual a few months before I began writing it. We were also less than a year from leaving what was, for me, a highly traumatic church experience (combined with on and off religious-based shaming and trauma for nearly 25 years). I had a lot of rage and grief to manage, and I gave it all to my fictional hero to bear because I couldn’t put voice to that pain any other way.
In the same novel, I also created a tender, loving foil of sorts for my hero. He represented the love and grace I needed. Combined, the two of them allowed me to find a space between, somewhere I could process the tension between hurt and healing. I put my fractured self back together by creating a personified romantic relationship between my trauma and my faith.
Later, I more overtly processed the grief of death. But in Keeping the Faith, I chose to allow my main character to work through his sadness in the same way I’d previously worked through my trauma—in the writing of a complex story. I used similar symbolism in Walking by Faith with a main character who uses religious vows to represent inner turmoil.
In a more concrete vein, I chose to make a character genderqueer not because he “revealed” anything to me but because I had only recently revealed to myself that my own gender existed outside the binaries. It is exceptionally important to me to be clear on this point because these things come from my way of trying to understand and/or cope with my world.
I think it can be valuable to distance ourselves a bit from our own emotions by claiming it’s what our characters insisted on. Sometimes we need that because things are too deep to admit even to ourselves. Also, we may not be ready to reveal to the world all our inner workings. When I wrote Cat as genderqueer, I wasn’t fully out yet. It was easier at the time to say it was “what Cat wanted” rather than saying, “Hey, I discovered new things about my gender” that would necessitate explaining it.
But I am now at a stage of life when I would rather be honest that this comes from inside my head. I fully actualized that when I wrote Year of the Guilty Soul. Toni, the main character, is very nearly literally me. I gave her life experiences that I didn’t have, and I changed some details of real-life situations both to protect people and to make a more compelling fiction. But she is me and I am her in a lot of ways.
The other problem I have with speaking in terms of what my characters “made” me do is that it is a place of privilege. We need to own it when we write characters different from ourselves if we are in the privileged position and they are not (i.e., white folks writing people of color, non-queer folks writing queer people, queer people writing about those of a more marginalized stripe, etc.). I have to be very clear that I on purpose strive for diversity not because of some social obligation but because it reflects the world I live in. Saying my characters caused me to write a thing can easily become a way to absolve myself of missteps in writing outside my experience.
I can’t tell others what to do, but I would urge others to use caution as well in this area. While I feel there are times when it’s okay for an author to hide behind a character (as I did when coming out), I also think it depends very much on the situation. I realize most people don’t mean it seriously, but the discourse often leaves me feeling really uncomfortable, especially as it surrounds marginalized identities. I want to be able to talk about how my queerness has shaped my life and my writing, and this is made exponentially more difficult when non-queer people (or when cis people or non-bi people or able-bodied people or gentiles) insist that their characters “talked to them” and told them they share my identity(-ies) but not their creators’. More often than not, it leaves me with the sense that the writer wants brownie points for diversity or being open-minded, and they won’t like what I have to say about my real-life experiences. It’s not a position I enjoy being in, and I will not put someone else in that place.
At this point, I won’t be describing my writing as driven by viewing my characters as active, living humans. I’m not going to affix blame on my characters for a story taking a new direction. No one “revealed” themselves to me. Either I learned something about myself that a character is reflecting, or I developed an idea, or I decided to create a character with certain life experiences. I may still joke about bossy characters, but I won’t ever discuss it as though I’m being serious. And I will never, ever discuss it in terms of a character “telling me” they have an identity that I don’t personally share.
I have a lot of thinking to do about my current work-in-progress. I believe one of the reasons I’ve been so stuck on it is that I’m afraid of what feelings it may dredge up. So it’s time to let myself have those feelings, in the same way I’ve done with every other book in this series (and, if I’m honest, my writing overall).
