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.

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A library of ghosts

I'm currently working on a trilogy about the fall of civilization that is not, I hasten to state, inspired by current events.

It's actually a story I've been cogitating on since I was in college.  How would ordinary people cope with the collapse of the comfortable support network we're all so very used to?  The three books of the trilogy are set about five hundred years apart, and center around (respectively) the time when everything fell apart, a period of "Dark Ages" during which a significant chunk of what's left of humanity has lost technology and even literacy, and the time during which things come full circle and people begin to rediscover science and mathematics and all that comes with it.  In the second book, The Scattering Winds, there's a sequence when the main character comes across the mostly-intact remnants of a library from before the fall -- and is overwhelmed by the magnitude of what was lost:

"Do these books come from the Before Time?" Kallian asked in a near whisper.

Kasprit Seely nodded, looking around them at the shadowed shelves, laden with dust-covered books.  "Before the flood, you mean?  I’ve no doubt that many of them do.  During the Black Years, with the floods and the plagues, people were trying their hardest just to survive.  A lot of them didn’t, of course.  From what I’ve read, in the times before, there were a thousandfold more people than there are now, and they had ample food and living space and comfort and could spend their time reading and writing books.  But when a hundred years passes with deprivation and famine and death on your doorstep every day, a lot is forgotten.  You’ll see in some books there are numbers that I believe were some sort of system of keeping track of the passage of years.  But I’ve not been able to decipher how it’s to be read, nor how it relates to the present day.  Nowadays we simply track time by the year of the reign of the current king.  So this is the twenty-first year of the reign of High King Sweyn VII, long may he live."  Kasprit pulled a book off a shelf in the room they’d entered—the cover said The Diversity of Life by E. O. Wilson, and was adorned with a design of a brightly-colored beetle with long antennae.  He blew the dust off the top and opened the cover, flipped a couple of pages in, and rested the tip of his long index finger on a line that said, "Copyright 1992."

I thought about this scene when I came upon an article about an archaeological discovery made in 2017 in the center of the German city of Cologne.  Cologne is immensely old; it was the main settlement of the Ubii, a Germanic tribe that (unlike many of their neighbors) forged a strong and long-lasting alliance with the Romans.  Eventually, the place got so thoroughly Romanized that it was renamed Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium -- "Colony of Claudius and the Altar of the Agrippinians."  This proved to be a clumsy appellation, and it was shortened to Colonia, which is where the modern name of Cologne comes from.

Well, it turns out in the center of modern Cologne, a city with a million inhabitants, are the remnants of what used to be the Library of Colonia.  At first, it was thought that the foundation was part of a stone-walled fortification, but when the archaeologists began to discover deep niches in the walls, they realized that its purpose was something altogether different.

"It took us some time to match up the parallels – we could see the niches were too small to bear statues inside," said Dirk Schmitz, of the Roman-Germanic Museum of Cologne, who participated in the research.  "But what they are are kind of cupboards for the scrolls.  They are very particular to libraries – you can see the same ones in the library at Ephesus."

The foundations of the Roman Library of Cologne [Image courtesy of the Romano-Germanic Museum of Cologne]

The library of Cologne in its heyday -- the middle of the second century C.E. -- is thought to have housed around twenty thousand scrolls, of which not a single one survives.  All that remains are the spaces they occupied, now inhabited only by the ghosts of long-gone books whose titles we'll never know.

When I read this article, I was struck with same feeling of longing and grief I get whenever I think about the Great Library of Alexandria and the other repositories of human knowledge.  It's what I tried to communicate in Kallian Dorn's character in The Scattering Winds; perhaps lost knowledge can be regained, but the creativity, hearts, and voices of the people who wrote these scrolls are gone forever.  Impermanence is part of reality, and -- in the words of the band Kansas -- "Nothing lasts forever but the Earth and sky."  But seeing the remains of this once-great library makes me mourn for what was housed there, even so.

I suspect I'm not the only one who feels this way.  And if time travel is ever invented, I think the Great Libraries of Antiquity tour is going to be sold out indefinitely.

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The book in the bog

It's a sad truth that written records are ephemeral.

The Library of Alexandria burns, taking with it an unguessed number of priceless manuscripts.  Ink fades; some kinds of ink actually degrade the paper and make its demise even faster.  Mildew and mold take their toll if there's even the slightest amount of moisture.  Insects like the taste of the glue used to hold older books together.  And -- in the words of Brother William of Baskerville, the brilliant main character in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose -- "rats like books almost as much as scholars do."

The result is that books and scrolls are better than no written records at all, but are very far from permanent.  This is why the survival of a book of prayers in a peat bog in County Tipperary, Ireland, for twelve hundred years is something akin to a miracle.

I found out about what is now known as the Faddan More Psalter from a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, and was as fascinated by how manuscript conservationists restored the book (as much as was possible) as I was by its mere survival.  When it was discovered by someone cutting peat, it was so sodden with bog water that no one dared to try opening it.  When they were finally able to pull the pages away from each other, the first words the researchers saw were in ualle lacrimarum ("in the valley of tears"), and they quickly realized that it was a medieval rendering of the Book of Psalms.

That was only the beginning of the restoration effort.  Not only was there the danger of the paper disintegrating when the pages were peeled apart, there was the problem that the iron gall ink used to write the manuscript had in some places eaten right through it, so what the conservationists had was a bunch of loose letters.

[Image by Valerie Dowling and the National Museum of Ireland]

The first three years after the discovery of the book, the priority was drying it out and stabilizing what was left of it.  Dewatering the paper was done first by freeze-drying it, then putting it in a near-vacuum so the water would evaporate without further damaging the pages.

"It was absolutely terrifying," said John Gillis, chief manuscript conservationist at Trinity College Dublin, home of other treasures like The Book of Kells.  "I heard from someone in the British Museum that there was a picture of the mass on the walls in a staff area there with the words ‘if you think you have a bad day ahead …’  You had this nerve-racking scenario of disturbing this material, which meant losing evidence, when the whole point was trying to gain as much information as possible."

Ultimately, Gillis and his team were able to dry out and tease apart the pages of the Faddan More Psalter. "The rewards when you slowly lifted up a fragment, and suddenly beneath this little bit of decoration would appear, particularly the yellow pigment they used. It would kind of shine back at you," Gillis said.  "And you’d go: ‘Wow, I am the first person to see this in 1,200 years.’  So that kind of privilege made all the sleepless nights and racking of the brain worthwhile.  It was the purest conservation I’ve ever carried out.  There is no repair, I’ve attached nothing new.  All I’ve done is captured and stabilized."

What strikes me most about all this is the tremendous patience the conservationists had with letting the book give up its secrets on its own timetable.  Rushing the process would have undoubtedly caused further damage.  The whole restoration process took years, but now we have a glimpse at a book that, amazingly, escaped decaying into nothing while submerged in a bog for over a millennium.

Showing that books, although undoubtedly ephemeral, are more resilient than you might think.  All of which makes me wonder what else is out there waiting to be discovered.

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I've always loved a good parody, and one of the best I've ever seen was given to me decades ago as a Christmas present from a friend.  The book, Science Made Stupid, is a send-up of middle-school science texts, and is one of the most fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious things I've ever read.  I'll never forget opening the present on Christmas morning and sitting there on the floor in front of the tree, laughing until my stomach hurt.

If you want a good laugh -- and let's face it, lately most of us could use one -- get this book.  In it, you'll learn the proper spelling of Archaeopteryx, the physics of the disinclined plane, little-known constellations like O'Brien and Camelopackus, and the difference between she trues, shoe trees, and tree shrews. (And as I mentioned, it would make the perfect holiday gift for any science-nerd types in your family and friends.)

Science education may never be the same again.

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

Dragon slaying

If you needed further evidence that being in an administrative role does not necessarily mean you have any idea what you're talking about, witness the pronouncement by Head Teacher Graeme Whiting of Acorn School, a private school in Nailsworth, Gloucester, England, to wit:  children should not read fantasy literature because it will damage their "sensitive subconscious brains."  Instead of Tolkein, Lewis, L'Engle, Rowling, and McCaffrey, he said, students are better off reading classics such as Shakespeare, Shelley, Wordsworth, et al.

Here's his complete quote:

I want children to read literature that is conducive to their age and leave those mystical and frightening texts for when they can discern reality, and when they have first learned to love beauty. 

Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and Terry Pratchett, to mention only a few of the modern world's 'must-haves', contain deeply insensitive and addictive material which I am certain encourages difficult behaviour in children; yet they can be bought without a special licence, and can damage the sensitive subconscious brains of young children, many of whom may be added to the current statistics of mentally ill young children... 

Buying sensational books is like feeding your child with spoons of added sugar, heaps of it, and when the child becomes addicted it will seek more and more, which if related to books, fills the bank vaults of those who write un-sensitive books for young children! 

Children are innocent and pure at the same time, and don't need to be mistreated by cramming their imagination that lies deep within them, with inappropriate things.

Starting with the fact that this makes me want to shout "CITE YOUR SOURCES" in Mr. Whiting's face every other sentence, there are a few problems with this claim.

First, has he actually read any "classic literature?"

Let me give you an example.  My school is currently having a contest for both students and staff wherein if you read a hundred books in four years, you get your name painted on the library wall.  Of the hundred books, twenty of them have to be classics.  The result is that I am now in the middle of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.  Consider the following "inappropriate things" that I have so far discovered therein:

The characters are, one and all, horrible people.  Heathcliff, who I think we're supposed to relate to or at least empathize with, is a sadistic sociopath.  His thwarted lover Catherine is a whining, petulant, narcissistic shrew who goes on a hunger strike every time she doesn't get her way.  Edgar Linton (perhaps the most sympathetic character in the story, which isn't saying much) is a weak-willed milquetoast.  His sister Isabella appears to have no brains whatsoever.  Catherine's brother Hindley Earnshaw is a violent drunk, his son Hareton a swearing, sneering brat.  The servants are no better; Nelly Dean, the narrator through most of the book, meddles continuously with the result of making the already bad situation truly awful, and Joseph is a sullen religious nutter who speaks in a garbled patois that appears to be some bizarre hybrid between Yorkshire dialect and Esperanto.

"A romantic classic," the back cover says.  Really?  This romance for the ages starts with Heathcliff and Catherine falling madly in love with one another.  As a result, and because this makes total sense, Catherine decides to marry Edgar, then torments him for years as if this was his fault.  Heathcliff, however, evidently learns from Catherine's example that marrying someone you dislike out of spite is a great move.  Because he then follows suit, marries Edgar's sister Isabella, and on their honeymoon he is so angry at Isabella for not being Catherine that he hangs her dog.

Yes.  Her dog.  Heathcliff hangs her dog.

On their HONEYMOON.

Of course, being a romantic classic, one after the other of them come to bad ends.  So the entire story is 325 pages about really nasty people who are dying, just not nearly fast enough.

And Shakespeare?  What about the lovely, sensitive, and appropriate stories of King Lear and A Winter's Tale and (heaven forfend) Titus Andronicus?  The sex and violence is certainly not confined to the Bard of Avon, either.  Consider, for example, the Greek classics.  I actually really like Sophocles, and his plays are mostly about the cheering themes of incest, parricide, and damnation.

The second problem is not only does Mr. Whiting evidently not know the classics, he doesn't know much about fantasy literature, either.  So reading fantasy novels encourages "difficult behaviour" and results in "mental illness?"  I think you would have to go far to find a character that embodies loyalty more than Sam Gamgee, one that demonstrates the power of love in redemption more than Severus Snape, one that is a better role model for steadfastness and courage than Hazel from Watership Down, one that twists together yearning and loss and grief and beauty more heart-wrenchingly than Taran (from the sadly little-known five-volume Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander).  Those characters resonate precisely because they appeal to our higher selves, give us a sense that we can rise above our challenges and meet life head-on.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now understand: I'm not saying that all fantasy literature is appropriate for all ages.  Game of Thrones, for example, is clearly targeted toward adults.  But to tar all fantasy literature with the same brush is idiotic.  And the claim that children are somehow damaged from reading A Wrinkle in Time is absurd.

However, despite my generally negative impression of Wuthering Heights, I think kids should read the classics, too.  I didn't read Shakespeare until I was a freshman in college, which I think is pitiful.  (And when I reluctantly started reading Othello in my freshman lit class, I was transfixed -- and couldn't believe what I'd been missing.)

Children (and adults) should read all kinds of books, from light entertainment to deep and thought-provoking literature that will still be with them years later.  The point is to enter a different world on the first page -- and to have your mind come out different when you reach the last one.

Good fantasy literature is transformative.  Far from "cramming [children's] imagination... with inappropriate things," the best of fantasy reaches levels that I can only describe as spiritual.  As C. S. Lewis put it, "Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."

Grist for the mill

Over the Thanksgiving holiday we were in Northampton, Massachusetts visiting family, and we took the opportunity to visit an amazing used bookstore called The Bookmill, in Montague.

[image courtesy of photographer John Phelan and the Wikimedia Commons]

The Bookmill is sited in an old mill house on the Sawmill River, and bills itself as "books you don't need in a place you can't find."  We found it anyhow, and spent a diverting couple of hours wandering around its maze of little wood-floored rooms and creaking, narrow staircases, and (of course) came away with a box full of books, which we did too need, thank you very much.

For my son Nathan: a book on quantum physics and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy.  For my wife Carol: several books of poetry and essays.  For me, on the other hand, three masterpieces:

• Ghosts Among Us: Eyewitness Accounts of True Hauntings, by Harry Ludlum
• UFOs and How to See Them, by Jenny Randles
• How to Read the Aura, Practice Psychometry, Telepathy, and Clairvoyance, by W. E. Butler

All of this elicited a great amount of eye-rolling on the part of various family members.  Myself, I was thrilled, and these books will now occupy a nice spot on my bookshelf next to Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life by Ivan T. Sanderson.

But not, of course, before I entertain you with a few excerpts.

From Ghosts Among Us, we read the following, in a story called "The Council House Horrors:"

A family of four, a couple and their grown-up son and daughter, living in a post-war council house in Swindon, Wiltshire, were rehoused when it was feared they were heading for nervous breakdowns. 

First, Mrs. Gladys Tucker saw the shadow of a man standing on the landing.  Then all manner of strange things began to happen.  Objects moved themselves mysteriously; windows that should have been shut were found open; door handles raised and lowered themselves.  Apparitions of animals were seen.  The daughter saw strange lights on her bed and bedroom walls.  The son was held pinned to a wall by an unseen force. 

The daughter was driven to seeing a nerve specialist, while the son was so shaken that he left home to live with a relation. 

When their father, Mr. Herbert Tucker, a storekeeper, now deeply concerned for the health of his wife and daughter, called on the council for help, police went over the house thoroughly and the local electricity board inspected wires and lights, but they found nothing.

Because that's a logical thing to do if your kid is "pinned to a wall by an unseen force."  "Well, Mr. Tucker, your son may have been thrown against a wall by an evil spirit, but your wires and breaker boxes look fine.  I'll leave you with my bill, shall I?"

We are told that the Tuckers moved out, but were followed by other tenants who had bizarre experiences, including seeing the ghost of a dead window-washer who had fallen and broken his neck, and a specter of a headless girl.  But eventually the whole thing died down, presumably because the ghosts got bored and moved to somewhere nicer than a "post-war council house."


Now, let's turn to my second find, UFOs and How to See Them.  My first thought, on picking this one up, was, "How can you write an instruction manual on how to see UFOs?  It's not like they come when called, or anything."  But this is exactly what Ms. Randles has set out to do.  In it, we read such tantalizing hints as:

• UFOs are often sighted near geologic fault zones
• UFOs are more likely to be seen after cold fronts pass through an area
• Crop circles are left behind by aliens as an intelligence test
• William Shatner got lost on his motorcycle in the Mojave Desert, and was guided to safety by a "silvery UFO"
• Ezekiel's visions in the bible were UFO sightings
• "City folk are largely unobservant.  A giant UFO could drift overhead and many of them would never see it!"

So there you are, then.  To her credit, Ms. Randles does give a lot of information on "IFOs" -- "identified flying objects."  She tells you how to recognize known phenomena, so you are less likely to be fooled if you see a weather balloon, a distant jet, a bird, or the planet Venus.  So that's all to the good, although I do sort of wish the aliens had left William Shatner out there in the desert.

Then we have the amazing How to Read the Aura, Practice Psychometry, Telepathy, and Clairvoyance, the book that was thrown across the room in disgust by my brother-in-law after reading the following:

The etheric vision is sometimes called "X ray vision" as it allows its possessor to see through physical matter.  In the early days of mesmerism it was developed for the medical diagnosis of diseases, and since the etheric clairvoyant can, in some cases, apparently see into the interior of the human body and closely observe the working of its various organs, it is easy to see how very helpful this form of clairvoyance can be.

My sense is that it wouldn't be so much "helpful" as "disgusting," but that's just me.

Of course, I was curious about auras, and so I turned to the chapter called "What is the Aura?" to read the following:

... (T)he aura is defined as "a subtle invisible essence or fluid said to emanate from human and animal bodies, and even from things; a psychic electro-vital, electro-mental effluvium, partaking of both mind and body, hence the atmosphere surrounding a person..."  The aura is usually seen as a luminous atmosphere around all living things, including what we regard as inanimate matter.

So, living things, including non-living things.  Got it.

Nathan's comment about the above was that if you're experiencing an electro-mental effluvium, you should probably see a doctor.  I replied that he only thought that because he had a puce-colored aura.


Anyhow.  If you're ever in northwestern Massachusetts, you should definitely visit The Bookmill.  You probably won't find books as entertaining as the three I bought, but I'm sure you'll come away with something awesome.