Fiction come to life

Regular readers of this blog know that besides my obvious hat of Skepticism Blogger, I also wear a second one, which is Fiction Writer.  And we fiction writers are, almost without exception, a strange breed.  Discussions with other authors has turned up a commonality, a psychic oddity that I thought for a time was unique to me: our fictional characters sometimes take on a life of their own, to the point that they seem...

... real.

The result is that there are times that I feel like I'm not inventing, but recounting, stories.  The plot takes turns I never intended, the characters do things that surprise me for reasons that only later become apparent.  In my current work-in-progress, a quirky novel called The Accidental Magician that follows Stephen King's dictum to "create sympathy for your characters, then turn the monsters loose," I've "discovered" that (1) a character who I thought was nice but rather bland has turned out to be scrappy and edgy, (2) a character who started out as a bit of a puffed-up, arrogant git unexpectedly became a serious badass, and most surprisingly, (3) a character I thought was dead is still alive.  

I honestly had no knowledge of any of this when I started the story.

Be that as it may, I really do (truly) know that it's me inventing the whole thing.  My books are, after all, on the "Fiction" aisle in the bookstore.  Which makes the claims of a few authors even more peculiar than the Who's-Driving-The-Car sensation I sometimes get; because these authors claim that they've actually met their characters.

Like, in real life, in flesh and blood.  According to an article in The Daily Grail, more than one writer has said that (s)he has been out and about, and there, large as life, has been someone from one of their stories.

Alan Moore, for example, author of the Hellblazer series, said that he ran into his character John Constantine in a London sandwich bar.  "All of a sudden, up the stairs came John Constantine," Moore said in an interview.  "He looked exactly like John Constantine.  He looked at me, stared me straight in the eyes, smiled, nodded almost conspiratorially, and then just walked off around the corner to the other part of the snack bar."

Moore considered following him, but then decided not to.  "I thought it was the safest," he said.

Graphic novel artist Dave McKean has also met a fictional character, but not one of his own; he says he's run into the character Death from Neil Gaiman's series Sandman.  Which has to have been pretty alarming, considering.

Of course, most people, myself included, chalk this up to the overactive imagination that we writers tend to have.  We picture our characters vividly, imagine the scenes in full Technicolor and Sensurround, so it's not really that surprising that sometimes we see things that make us wonder if maybe our fictional worlds have come to life.  But some people believe that this isn't a coincidence -- some chance resemblance of a person to a character in one of our stories -- but a real, literal manifestation of a fictional being into the waking world.

The (fictional) Japanese evil spirit Oiwa, as depicted by Utagawa Kuniyoshi in the story Yotsuya Kaidan (1825) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Such fiction-become-real beings even have a name.  They're called tulpas, from a Sanskrit word meaning "conjured thing."  In the western occult tradition, the idea is that through the sheer force of will, through the power that the imagined being has in our minds, it becomes real.

And not just to its creator; believers claim that a tulpa has an independent reality.  Graphic novel writer Doug Moench, in fact, says he met one face to face.  The story is recounted in Jeffrey Kripal's book Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, and is excerpted in The Daily Grail link I included above; but suffice it to say that Moench was writing a scene in one of his Planet of the Apes comics about a black-hooded bad guy holding a gun to the head of a character, and heard his wife call him -- and he went into the room to find a black-hooded intruder holding a gun to his wife's head.

Understandably shaken by this experience, Moench apparently went through a period where he was uncertain if he should continue writing, because he was afraid that it would become real.

Predictably, I think what we have going on here isn't anything paranormal.  Moench's experience was almost certainly nothing more than a bizarre, and very upsetting, coincidence, and a fine example of dart-thrower's bias (think about all the millions of scenes writers have created that haven't come true).  But there's something about the tulpa thing that still gives me a bit of a shiver, even so.  There are plenty of characters I've created that I'd just as soon stay fictional, thank you very much.  (The amoral domestic terrorist Jeff Landry in my novel In the Midst of Lions is a good example; that sonofabitch was awful enough on the printed page.)

But there are a few characters from stories I've written that I wouldn't mind meeting.  Tyler Vaughan from Signal to Noise comes to mind, because more than one person has told me that Tyler is actually a younger version of me, and I'd like to apologize to him for saddling him with my various neuroses.  And I'd like to meet Leandre Naquin from The Communion of Shadows just so I can give him a big hug.  But the majority of 'em -- yeah, they can stay fictional.

So I'll take a pass on the whole tulpa thing.  For one thing, I see no possible way it could work.  For another, all the accounts of authors meeting their characters are way too easily explained by the fact that writers' skulls tend to be filled with things that I can only call waking dreams, so we're to be excused if sometimes we blur the edges of reality and fiction.

And third: I'd rather not have some of the scenes I've written come to life.  I had a hard enough time putting my characters through some of that stuff.  No way in the world would I want to live through it myself.

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He sees you when you're sleeping

Dear Readers,

I'll be taking next week off to spend some time with family, so there'll be a brief hiatus here at Skeptophilia HQ.  Posts will resume Monday, December 31, but I'll still be happy to receive any suggestions for topics while I'm on break!

So happy holidays to all who celebrate.  See you on New Year's Eve.

cheers,

Gordon

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Ever heard of a tulpa?

I wrote about this (alleged) phenomenon a while back, so long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall that it is when a bunch of people believe in a fictional character with sufficient fervor that said character becomes real.

Well, in some sense.  Even most true believers don't think they end up as flesh-and-blood, more that they can appear in spirit form (whatever that means when applied to a character that is fictional in the first place).  It all sounds like a lot of wishful thinking to me, although as a fiction writer, I can say with some certainty that I would very much rather the characters in my books not come to life.  There are a few I'd like to have a beer with, sure.  But most of them?

They can stay safely in the realm of the unreal, thank you very much.

Be that as it may, apparently there are now people who think that there's a tulpa who is around mostly at this time of year.  So I'm sure you can predict that who I'm talking about is...

... Santa Claus.

No, I'm not making this up.  In an article over at Mysterious Universe, Brent Swancer tells us about a number of alleged sightings of Jolly Old Saint Nick.  And not to beat the point unto death, these people do not believe that they're seeing someone dressed up as Santa Claus; they think they've actually had a close encounter with the real guy.

The word real, of course, being used advisedly.  I don't want to steal Swancer's thunder, because his article is well worth reading in its entirety, but here's one such account, just so you can get the flavor of it.  A woman named Ana says she saw Santa when she was five years old, and the encounter was not exactly heartwarming:

He must have felt my presence because he turned around and looked at me.  He didn’t look jolly or kind and happy like you would expect Santa Claus to look.  He looked kind of eerie like he was staring into my soul.  Automatically, I ran into my parents’ room and hid under the covers.  I don’t know why I was so scared at the time, but I wrote it off as a dream for a while before I forgot about it completely.  Years later, I remembered it.  I thought it could have been a burglar, but when I asked my parents, nothing was ever missing from that apartment.  The only time we were ever robbed was when we moved later on.  The only explanation I have now is that it was some kind of apparition.

Of course, that's not the only explanation, but you knew I'd say that.

His eyes, how they twinkled!  His dimples, how merry!  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jackie, Evil clown Santa Claus, CC BY 2.0]

Loyd Auerbach, a "professor of parapsychology" over at Atlantic University, used the same verbiage to describe the accounts:

I’ve never even heard of people seeing Santa.  The Grim Reaper, yes, but not Santa.  The only possibility of this being real is if it’s an alien or a ghost pretending to be Santa.  We can’t investigate that.  There’s nothing we can do with that.

Um.  We could investigate it if it was the Grim Reaper, but not if it's Santa?  Or if it's not actually Santa, our only options are that it's an alien or a ghost impersonating Santa?

 I think these people need to review the concept of "only possibility."

So anyhow, I think the main issue here is that if it were true, it doesn't exactly paint a reassuring picture of Santa Claus.  In fact, it gives kind of sinister overtones to lines like "He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake," not to mention, "I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus."  It also gives me pause when I hear the stanza from "Up on the Housetop" that goes:

Next comes the stocking of Little Will
Oh, just see what a glorious fill
Here is a hammer and lots of tacks
Also a ball and a whip that cracks.

Is it just me, or does it sound like Little Will made his Christmas list to fill out the equipment in his My Very Own Li'l Tots S & M Dungeon?

Myself, I find the whole thing vaguely terrifying.  It's a good thing I think it's all a myth.  On the other hand, even if Sinister Santa is a real thing, he's still better than Krampus or the Giant Icelandic Christmas Cat, the Jólakötturinn, who comes out on Christmas Eve and eats bad children.

Which, for the record, I didn't make up.

So a lovely Christmas to all who celebrate, and best of luck avoiding evil Santas or humongous child-eating cats.  Also the Grim Reaper, for what it's worth.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Michio Kaku's The Physics of the Impossible.  Kaku takes a look at the science and technology that is usually considered to be in the realm of science fiction -- things like invisibility cloaks, replicators, matter transporters, faster-than-light travel, medical devices like Star Trek's "tricorders" -- and considers whether they're possible given what we know of scientific law, and if so, what it would take to develop them.  In his signature lucid, humorous style, Kaku differentiates between what's merely a matter of figuring out the technology (such as invisibility) and what's probably impossible in a a real and final sense (such as, sadly, faster-than-light travel).  It's a wonderful excursion into the power of the human imagination -- and the power to make at least some of it happen.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Fiction come to life

Regular readers of this blog know that besides my two hats of Skepticism Blogger and High School Science Teacher, I also wear a third one, which is Fiction Writer.  And we fiction writers are, almost without exception, a strange breed.  Discussions with other authors has turned up a commonality, a psychic quirk that I thought for a time was unique to me: our fictional characters sometimes take on a life of their own, to the point that they seem...

... real.

The result is that there are times that I feel like I'm not inventing, but recounting, stories.  The plot takes turns I never intended, the characters do things that surprise me for reasons that only later become apparent.  In my current work-in-progress, a strange, neo-mythological novel called The Fifth Day that follows Stephen King's dictum to "create sympathy for your characters, then turn the monsters loose," one of my characters has turned out to be a great deal nicer than I ever suspected he'd be.  His soft side came from a history of childhood neglect that prompts him to befriend another character, a twelve-year-old boy.  I honestly had no knowledge of this when I started the story.

Of course, that won't stop me from killing him in a few chapters.  But still, it's nice to know he's not the macho jerk he seemed to be at first.

Be that as it may, I really do (truly) know that it's me inventing the whole thing.  My books are, after all, on the "Fiction" aisle in the bookstore.  Which makes the claims of a few authors even more peculiar than the Who's-Driving-The-Car sensation I sometimes get; because these authors claim that they've actually met their characters.

Like, in real life, in flesh and blood.  According to a recent article in The Daily Grail, more than one writer has said that (s)he has been out and about, and there, large as life, has been someone from one of their stories.

Alan Moore, for example, author of the Hellblazer series, said that he ran into his character John Constantine in a London sandwich bar.  "All of a sudden, up the stairs came John Constantine," Moore said in an interview.  "He looked exactly like John Constantine.  He looked at me, stared me straight in the eyes, smiled, nodded almost conspiratorially, and then just walked off around the corner to the other part of the snack bar."

Moore considered following him, but then decided not to.  "I thought it was the safest," he said.

Graphic novel artist Dave McKean has also met a fictional character, but not one of his own; he says he's run into the character Death from Neil Gaiman's series Sandman.  Which has to have been pretty alarming, considering.

Of course, most people, myself included, chalk this up to the overactive imagination that we writers tend to have.  We picture our characters vividly, imagine the scenes in full Technicolor and Sensurround, so it's not really that surprising that sometimes we see things that make us wonder if maybe our fictional worlds have come to life.  But some people believe that this isn't a coincidence -- some chance resemblance of a person to a character in one of our stories -- but a real, literal manifestation of a fictional being into the waking world.

The (fictional) Japanese evil spirit Oiwa [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Such fiction-become-real beings even have a name.  They're called tulpas, from a Sanskrit word meaning "conjured thing."  In the western occult tradition, the idea is that through the sheer force of will, through the power that the imagined being has in our minds, it becomes real.

And not just to its creator; believers claim that a tulpa has an independent reality.  Graphic novel writer Doug Moench, in fact, says he met one face to face.  The story is recounted in Jeffrey Kripal's book Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, and is excerpted in The Daily Grail link I included above; but it suffices to say that Moench was writing a scene in one of his Planet of the Apes comics about a black-hooded bad guy holding a gun to the head of a character, and heard his wife call him -- and he went into the room to find a black-hooded intruder holding a gun to his wife's head.

Understandably shaken by this experience, Moench apparently went through a period where he was uncertain if he should continue writing -- because he was afraid that it would become real.

Predictably, I think what we have going on here isn't anything paranormal.  Moench's experience was almost certainly nothing more than a bizarre, and very upsetting, coincidence, and a fine example of dart-thrower's bias (think about all the millions of scenes writers have created that haven't come true).  But there's something about the tulpa thing that still gives me a bit of a shiver, even so.  There are plenty of characters I've created that I'd just as soon stay fictional, thank you very much.  (The old man in the interrogation room from my soon-to-be-released novel Kill Switch being a case in point; that sonofabitch was awful enough on the printed page.)

But there are a few characters from stories I've written that I wouldn't mind meeting.  Tyler Vaughan from Signal to Noise comes to mind, because more than one person has told me that Tyler is actually a younger version of me, and I'd like to apologize to him for saddling him with my various neuroses.  But the majority of 'em -- yeah, they can stay fictional.

So I'll take a pass on the whole tulpa thing.  For one thing, I see no possible way it could work.  For another, all the accounts of authors meeting their characters are way too easily explained by the fact that writers' skulls tend to be filled with things that I can only call waking dreams, so we're to be excused if sometimes we blur the edges of reality and fiction.

And third: I'd rather not have some of the scenes I've written come to life.  I had a hard enough time putting my characters through some of that stuff.  No way in the world would I want to live through it myself.