Encounters with the imaginary

Yesterday I had an interesting conversation with a dear friend of mine, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite.  (Do yourself a favor and check out her books -- she's written in several different genres, and the one thing that unites them all is that they're fantastic.)  It had to do with how we authors come up with characters -- and how often it feels like we're not inventing them, but discovering them, gradually getting to know some actual person we only recently met.  The result is that they can sometimes seem more real than the real people we encounter every day.

"In my early days of writing, my lead male character was a handsome but rather reclusive country-boy detective," K. D. told me.  "The kind who doesn't realize how good he looks in his jeans.  Anyway, whilst in the middle of bringing this book to life, I saw him in the store looking at shirts.  I was startled, seeing him so unexpectedly that way.  So, like any good delusional person would do, I walked toward him and started to ask, 'Hey, Cody.  What are you doing here?'  Thank God, I came to myself, woke up, or whatever, before I reached him and embarrassed myself into the next realm."

I've never had the experience of meeting someone who was strikingly similar to one of my characters, but I've certainly had them take the keyboard right out of my hands and write themselves a completely different part.  The two strangest examples of this both occurred in my Arc of the Oracles trilogy.  In the first book, In the Midst of Lions, the character of Mary Hansard literally appeared out of thin air -- the main characters meet her while fleeing for their lives as law and order collapses around them, and she cheerfully tells them, "Well, hello!  I've been waiting for all of you!"

I had to go back and write an entire (chronologically earlier) section of the book to explain who the hell she was and how she'd known they were going to be there, because I honestly hadn't known she was even in the story.

In the third book, The Chains of Orion, the character of Marig Kastella was initially created to be the cautious, hesitant boyfriend of the cheerful, bold, and swashbuckling main character, the astronaut Kallman Dorn.  Then, halfway through, the story took a sharp left-hand turn when Marig decided to become the pivot point of the whole plot -- and ended up becoming one of my favorite characters I've ever... created?  Discovered?  Met?  I honestly don't know what word to use.

That feeling of being the recorder of real people and events, not the designer of fictional ones, can be awfully powerful.

"Another time," K. D. told me, "we had taken a road trip to North Carolina so I could do some research for a huge historical family saga I was writing.  (I was so immersed in the creation of that book that my then-husband was actually jealous of the main character -- I kid you not!)  As we went through Winston-Salem, we drove past a huge cemetery.  I said, 'Oh, let's stop there.  Maybe that's where the Raven boys are buried and I can find their graves.'  And then I remembered.. the Raven boys weren't buried there.  They weren't buried anywhere.  Good grief."

Turns out we're not alone in this.  A 2020 study carried out by some researchers at Durham University, that was the subject of a paper in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, and received a review in The Guardian, involved surveying authors at the International Book Festival in Edinburgh in 2014 and 2018.  The researchers asked a set of curious questions:

1. How do you experience your characters?
2. Do you ever hear your characters’ voices?
3. Do you have visual or other sensory experiences of your characters, or sense their presence?
4. Can you enter into a dialogue with your characters?
5. Do you feel that your characters always do what you tell them to do, or do they act of their own accord?
6. How does the way you experience your characters’ voices feed into your writing practice?  Please tell us about this process.
7. Once a piece of writing or performance is finished, what happens to your characters’ voices?
8. If there are any aspects of your experience of your characters’ voices or your characters more broadly that you would like to elaborate on, please do so here.
9. In contexts other than writing, do you ever have the experience of hearing voices when there is no one around?  If so, please describe these experiences.  How do these experiences differ from the experience of hearing the voice of a character?

Question #9 was obviously thrown in there to identify test subjects who were prone to auditory hallucinations anyway.  But even after you account for these folks, a remarkable percentage of authors -- 63% -- say they hear their characters' voices, with 56% having visual or other sensory experiences of their characters. 62% reported at least some experience of feeling that their characters had agency -- that they could act of their own accord independent of what the author intended.

You might be expecting me, being the perennially dubious type, to scoff at this.  But all I can say is -- whatever is going on here -- this has happened to me.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Martin Hricko, Ghosts (16821435), CC BY 3.0]

Here are some examples that came out of the study, and that line up with the exactly the sort of thing both K. D. and I have experienced:

• I have a very vivid, visual picture of them in my head.  I see them in my imagination as if they were on film – I do not see through their eyes, but rather look at them and observe everything they do and say.
• Sometimes, I just get the feeling that they are standing right behind me when I write.  Of course, I turn and no one is there.
• They [the characters' voices] do not belong to me.  They belong to the characters.  They are totally different, in the same way that talking to someone is different from being on one’s own.
• I tend to celebrate the conversations as and when they happen.  To my delight, my characters don’t agree with me, sometimes demand that I change things in the story arc of whatever I’m writing.
• They do their own thing!  I am often astonished by what takes place and it can often be as if I am watching scenes take place and hear their speech despite the fact I am creating it.

"The writers we surveyed definitely weren’t all describing the same experience," said study lead author John Foxwell, "and one way we might make sense of that is to think about how writing relates to inner speech...  Whether or not we’re always aware of it, most of us are trying to anticipate what other people are going to say and do in everyday interactions.  For some of these writers, it might be the case that after a while their characters start to feel independent because the writers developed the same kinds of personality ‘models’ as they’d develop for real people, and these were generating the same kinds of predictions."

Which is kind of fascinating.  When I've done book signings, the single most common question revolves around where my characters and plots come from.  I try to give some kind of semi-cogent response, but the truth is, the most accurate answer is "beats the hell out of me."  They seem to pop into my head completely unannounced, sometimes with such vividness that I have to write the story to discover why they're important.  I often joke that I keep writing because I want to find out how the story ends, and there's a sense in which this is exactly how it seems.

I'm endlessly fascinated with the origins of creativity, and how creatives of all types are driven to their chosen medium to express ideas, images, and feelings they can't explain, and which often seem to come from outside.  Whatever my own experience, I'm still a skeptic, and I am about as certain as I can be that this is only a very convincing illusion, that the imagery and personalities and plots are bubbling up from some part of me that is beneath my conscious awareness.

But the sense that it isn't, that these characters have an independent existence, is really powerful.  So if (as I'm nearly certain) it is an illusion, it's a remarkably intense and persistent one, and seems to be close to ubiquitous in writers of fiction.

And I swear, I didn't have any idea beforehand about Mary Hansard's backstory and what Marig Kastella would ultimately become.  Wherever that information came from, I can assure you that I was as shocked as (I hope) my readers are to find it all out.

****************************************

One of the missing

I had a discussion with a friend of mine a few days ago about one of the most frustrating things -- especially for those of us plagued with insatiable curiosity -- which is when we have plenty of reliable information about a situation, but not enough to figure out what actually happened.  As skeptics, we have to be willing sometimes to say "We don't know, and may never know" -- but that doesn't make it a pleasant way to conclude matters.  Famously, that's the situation we're in with Jack the Ripper.  Despite the number of books out there that have titles like The Ripper Murders SOLVED!, if we're being honest, there just isn't enough hard evidence to reach a definitive answer.  I've dealt with several less-known (but still fascinating) examples here at Skeptophilia -- the downright bizarre Devonshire footprints, the unsolved mystery of Kaspar Hauser, and the strange disappearance of Frederick Valentich are three that come to mind immediately.

In each case, we know for certain that the events took place; i.e., they're not hoaxes or tall tales.  But despite in-depth inquiries by skeptical investigators, in the end we're still left with highly unsatisfying question marks.

Another example of this frustrating phenomenon revolves around the American writer Ambrose Bierce, most famous for his war stories "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "A Horseman in the Sky," and "One of the Missing."  He was also a prolific writer of horror fiction; his short stories "Haita the Shepherd" and "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" were profound influences on H. P. Lovecraft -- places like Lake Hali and Carcosa, and gods like Hastur, appear in the Cthulhu Mythos stories over and over, and a lot of people don't know that they originally came from Bierce rather than from Lovecraft.

Bierce was born in 1842 in Meigs County, Ohio, the tenth of thirteen children.  He grew up with a deep love of books, and intended a career as a journalist, but the Civil War intervened.  He was a staunch abolitionist and enlisted on the Union side, fought at the Battle of Philippi and the Battle of Shiloh, and nearly died of injuries received at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain.  His experiences during the war shaped not only his writing but his outlook.  Bierce was afterward deeply suspicious about the motives of his fellow humans, trusting very few people (and no one completely).

Ambrose Bierce in 1866 [Image is in the Public Domain]

His later life also shows a profound restlessness.  He spent time in San Francisco, Deadwood in the Dakota Territory, London, and Washington, D.C., never content to stay in one place for very long.  And these personality traits -- distrust of others, and a fundamentally restive nature -- both play into the most fascinating thing about Bierce, which is his mysterious disappearance.

In October of 1913 he left Washington to take a tour of Civil War battlefields.  He's documented as having passed through Louisiana and Texas, and crossed into Mexico at El Paso.  Mexico was at that point in the middle of a revolution; earlier that year President Francisco Madero and Vice President José Maria Pino Suárez had both been deposed and assassinated, and the country was an unsafe place by anyone's standards.  This didn't dissuade Bierce.  In his final letter, posted in December 1913 from the city of Chihuahua to his friend Blanche Partington, he said, "As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination...  Good-bye. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it is a pretty good way to depart this life.  It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs.  To be a gringo in Mexico -- ah, that is euthanasia!"

He was never heard from again.

United States consular officials investigated the matter.  After all, the disappearance of an American citizen, and a prominent one at that, was serious business, even if he'd gone to Mexico of his own free will.  Members of Pancho Villa's senior staff claimed that Bierce had been in Chihuahua, but had left the city voluntarily and no one knew where he was.  Oral tradition in Coahuila is that he was executed by firing squad.  As for his friend, Blanche Partington, her belief was that Bierce had staged the whole thing, doubled back through Arizona, and finally committed suicide somewhere near the Grand Canyon.  No reliable reports of him -- alive or dead -- exist after December of 1913; no further trace of him was ever found.

His disappearance has been the subject of much speculation, as well as a number of works of fiction, something that no doubt would have pleased Bierce no end.  (A few of them worked on the premise that Hastur and the rest of the gang were real, and didn't like the fact that Bierce had given away their existence, so they whisked him out of the desert to Carcosa so he couldn't reveal any more of their secrets.)  Ironic that in the end, Bierce himself -- perhaps intentionally -- became one of the missing.

And as frustrating as it is, that's where we have to leave Bierce's story.  He very likely died somewhere in the southwestern United States or northern Mexico in late 1913 or early 1914, but how and why we probably never will know.  Nor can we be certain of whether he was a victim of the Mexican Revolution, took his own life (as Blanche Partington believed), or died of thirst and starvation out alone in the desert.  As with the examples I began with, we're left with a mystery -- and in the absence of further evidence, as good skeptics that's where we must conclude matters.

But given his secrecy and distrust of his fellow humans, perhaps that's what Bierce would have wanted anyhow.

****************************************

The muzzle

The first people targeted by political ideologues are almost always the artists, authors, poets, and other creatives.

No other group has a way of striking at the soul the way these people do; often with one single image or turn of phrase they point out with blinding clarity the hypocrisy and ugliness of the people in power.  No wonder they're suppressed -- sometimes violently.  Faced with depictions of nudity or sexuality, one man said:

It is not the mission of art to wallow in filth for filth's sake, to paint the human being only in a state of putrefaction, to draw cretins as symbols of motherhood, or to present deformed idiots as representatives of manly strength...  [We will see to it that] works of art which cannot be understood in themselves but need some pretentious instruction book to justify their existence will never again find their way to the people.

Another commented, "Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists."

Make no mistake; book bans and book burnings, shutting down or defunding libraries and art exhibits, are not about protecting children from age-inappropriate material.  There is an honest discussion to be had about what is appropriate for children to learn about at what age, and no one -- liberal or conservative -- disputes that point.  This, however, goes way beyond that.

The people doing this don't want anyone, anywhere, to have access to books or art that runs against the straight White Christian agenda.  So the first to go are creative works by or about minorities, anything dealing openly with sexuality, and anything that even mentions LGBTQ+ people; i.e., anything labeled "degenerate."  It's not like the goal isn't obvious, especially with regards to sexuality.  "All things which take place in the sexual sphere are not the private affair of the individual," said one government official, "but signify the life and death of the nation."

And once that kind of thing gets started, it gets whipped into a frenzy, because the people doing it honestly believe they're fighting evil.  One witness to a book burning said the following:

I held my breath while he hurled the first volume into the flames: it was like burning something alive.  Then students followed with whole armfuls of books, while schoolboys screamed into the microphone their condemnations of this and that author, and as each name was mentioned the crowd booed and hissed.  You felt the venom behind their denunciations.  Children of fourteen mouthing abuse.

Creative people can fight back, but once the works are destroyed, in some sense it's too late.  One author, more optimistic than I am, said, "History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas.  Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them.  You can burn my books and the books of the best minds... but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds."

Perhaps so, but once access is stopped, you don't even have to burn the physical copies.  This is something fascists have learned all too well.  Control what people find out -- place a stranglehold on the media, and muzzle the people who dissent, especially the artists and writers -- and you're ninety percent of the way to victory.  "Those who don't read good books," said another famous author, "have no advantage over those who can't."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Alan Levine from Strawberry, United States, Book burning (3), CC BY 2.0]

The only acceptable response is to fight back.  Hard.  Especially us creative types, who are so frequently in the bullseye of the hatred.  If, as an adult, you find something offensive -- fine, don't read it.  However, passing legislation to prevent anyone else from reading it is the road to ceding control to the state over what people are allowed to see, hear, and think.  And if you don't think this is one short step from denying the personhood and right to exist of people who have an ethnicity, religion, political ideology, or sexual orientation different from the short list of ones accepted by the powers-that-be, you are being willfully blind to history.

Because -- oh, sorry, forgot to mention -- everything in this post comes from the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.  Who did you think I was talking about?

[Nota bene: the quotes are, in order, from Adolf Hitler (1937); German nationalist Max Nordau (1892); Heinrich Himmler (1937); American journalist Lilian T. Mowrer (1933); Helen Keller (1933); and Mark Twain (1895)]

****************************************

Research and rabbit holes

I've suspected for a while that the FBI is keeping a file on me based upon my Google search history.

This, I suspect, is something that plagues a lot of writers, but it's really hit home apropos of my murder mystery series, The Snowe Agency Mysteries, the research for which has resulted in some searches that would look seriously sketchy to anyone who didn't know I'm a writer.  These have included:

• What anesthetic available to a veterinarian would kill a human the most quickly?
• How fast does a bubble of air injected into an artery kill someone?
• Would the remains of a person poisoned to death twenty years ago still show traces of the poison?
• The behavior of psychopathic individuals
• The physiology of drowning
• How hard does a person need to be hit in the back of the head to knock them unconscious?

To anyone would-be Sherlocks out there: allow me to assure you that I have never killed, nor am I planning on killing, anyone.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Siddharthkrish at English Wikipedia., Statue of Sherlock Holmes in Edinburgh, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Writing takes you down some interesting rabbit holes, and I'm not just talking about writing mysteries.  One of the reasons I love writing fiction is that I learn so much in the process -- it gives me a chance to stretch my own brain a little.  Here are a few things I had to research for books I've written:

• Living conditions in 14th century Norway (Lock & Key)
• Communications and surveillance technology (Kill Switch)
• Eighteenth-century land grants in the northeastern U.S. (Descent into Ulthoa)
• Ancient Greek timekeeping devices (Gears)
• Medieval Jewish mystical traditions (Sephirot)
• Creatures from Japanese mythology (The Fifth Day)
• The effects of untreated type-1 diabetes (Whistling in the Dark)
• Viking ship design (Kári the Lucky)
• The rate of spread of the Black Death in England (We All Fall Down)
• The structure and furnishings in homes in nineteenth-century southern Louisiana (The Communion of Shadows)
• How long hydropower electric plants would keep functioning if left unattended (In the Midst of Lions)

And that's just scratching the surface.

I was chatting with a friend and fellow author a couple of days ago, and commented that fiction should open up new worlds, that if my readers are the same when they close the book as they were when they opened it, I've failed as a writer.  However, writing also opens up new worlds for the writer, lets us explore topics we'd otherwise never look into.  (It's all too easy to get lost in research -- to intend to sit down and write, and suddenly three hours have gone by, and all you've done is jump from one abstruse website to another, as my friend and writing partner Cly Boehs would be happy to tell you.)

There are two things about learning: (1) it's fun. And (2) you're never done.  And when it comes to writing, there are always new areas to investigate, new worlds to create.

So many stories to tell, so little time.

**********************************************

Author and biochemist Camilla Pang was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at age eight, and spent most of her childhood baffled by the complexities and subtleties of human interactions.  She once asked her mother if there was an instruction manual on being human that she could read to make it easier.

Her mom said no, there was no instruction manual.

So years later, Pang recalled the incident and decided to write one.

The result, Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us About Life, Love, and Relationships, is the best analysis of human behavior from a biological perspective since Desmond Morris's classic The Naked Ape.  If you're like me, you'll read Pang's book with a stunned smile on your face -- as she navigates through common, everyday behaviors we all engage in, but few of us stop to think about.

If you're interested in behavior or biology or simply agree with the Greek maxim "gnothi seauton" ("know yourself"), you need to put this book on your reading list.  It's absolutely outstanding.

[Note:  if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]