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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Guest post from Andrew Butters: Devil's in the details

Before we start, what are your thoughts on calling certain people Overzealous Grammar Reporting Enthusiasts instead of Grammar Na*is?  OGREs.  I think this works.  Hereinafter, that is how I will refer to them. With that out of the way, let’s get on with it.

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I read just about everything Gordon Bonnet writes.  I read his blog, Skeptophilia, daily (well, six days a week.  He takes Sundays off.  He was also kind enough to crosspost this for me today).  Occasionally, I’ll find a typo.  When I do, I shoot him a message pointing it out, and he thanks me and then fixes it (though sometimes he fixes it and then thanks me.  Potato potato).  My response is the same when he does the same for my writing here or on Facebook.

Tyops happen.  It's not an automatic sign that the writer was negligent.  It's not irrefutable proof that self-published authors are "lesser" when compared with traditionally published ones.  I’ve seen typos in Stephen King's books and from highly respected AP journalists.  Here’s a great example of a traditional publisher thinking that global search and replace was a good idea:

Readers who come across them vary.  Some ignore them and move on.  I typically ignore them, but if I were to find a shit-tonne, I'd stop reading and send the author or publisher a private message.  No need to make a scene.  That's me, though.  Some people latch onto them as if the fate of the literary world hangs in the balance (OGREs).  Take this example:

Now, I’m told that their book was reinstated after an outpouring of support from readers, but the fact that it happened should serve as a cautionary tale.  I scooped this screenshot from someone on Facebook, and one of the comments read (in part):

“You do your job poorly, there are consequences.  That’s how it works.  And no, if there is a typo in my book I AM telling Amazon because I want my money back.”
—Some OGRE on Facebook

It took all my willpower not to point out that Grammarly suggested not one but two corrections to his comment.  At any rate, I don't blame others for piping up if the typos are rampant.  The thing is, in my experience, books like that are rare.  I've read many books from established big names to first-time self-published authors and have yet to encounter one with enough errors to raise an eyebrow.  No, the plural of anecdote isn't data, but you get my point.  Sometimes shit happens.  Welcome to being human.  Unfortunately, not everyone sees it that way.

What follows is a true story.

I wrote Near Death By A Thousand Cuts over about a month, sometime in November 2022.  After writing, I let it sit for about a week.  Then, I started editing.  These were all personal anecdotes, so I didn't approach it like I would fiction.  The language was informal, and there was more swearing.

I made three passes of editing before sending it to my actual editor, who, in this case, happened to be Gordon (a great writer in his own right and a former teacher with an MA in linguistics).  I made the changes he recommended, adding a few more.

Then, I had seven beta readers go through it (reading critically, not just for fun), and THEY found errors.

Then, my mom (a former teacher) read it and found some stuff.

Then, I read the proofcopy and found more things.

Then, upon receiving what was supposed to be the final version to upload to KDP, I got a message from my layout designer.  SHE found a typo.

Like, holy shit.  Even after all the people and all the times this book was read, there was still a missing letter ("a" should have been "an").

Then, I recorded the audiobook, and guess what? I found MORE mistakes.

All that to say, editing is hard.

I have a good mind to send a link for Near Death to the OGRE from the quote above, with their high standards, and ask them to have a go at it.  I’d even refund them their money, forgoing my royalty and Amazon’s cut.

If you find a typo in my book Known Order Girls, I’ll mail you a bookplate (normally $5).  I extended this offer on Facebook, and someone took me up on it!  They were very kind, and I appreciate their eagle eyes catching something that made it through the editing gauntlet.

There will always be some asshole typo, waiting, lurking, biding its time, and making itself known only to that one reader who will fixate on it and leave a bad review as a result.

As Vonnegut probably wrote, "So ti goes."

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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.

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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!]