Making the Characters Real

I have the privilege, in this life, of being enriched by extraordinary friends—their stories, their insights, their questions. I don't get locked too deeply inside of me because of them. I get snapped out, to the broader perspective.

Yesterday—a long climb, a battle, even—I reached the 100-page mark in this novel I've been writing. I was attempting, over email, to explain its essence to Jane Satterfield, another Bread Loaf connection, a poet, a memoirist, an extraordinary professor at Loyola (I know, I've been there, I've met her students). Despite the garble of my email she seemed at once to understand where I am going, what I am wanting, how I am challenged, why I keep on waking up at 4 each morning, just for a shot at a small encounter with the novel. She had it down, she had me down, and then she asked this question: So you have imagined the characters into a very real past? Or has the research convinced you they are real? That is, that these imagined beings are ghosted by very real events?

It occurred to me that I'd never asked myself this question—and that the answer lies somewhere between the two poles of Jane's counterpoised assertion: The characters are real to me because at some basic level I share their impulses—because I have been ruined, too, by inadequacy, jealousy, inequity; because I have been spared by hope, by love. The research (into the streets they walk, the contraptions they encounter, the domestic politics of a long lost era, the weather) is what sets the characters free from me, gives them complex lives of their own.

Well, it took me all morning to figure that out. Now to open the tightly fisted bud of page one hundred and one.