Monday, October 29, 2012

Writers Live Double Lives

Pretense is a syllable too many for most writers when they take account of the role they play in their stories. It’s one word that don’t fit into the puzzle. Doesn’t spark a vibe.

Feigning their fictional people’s emotional roller coasters is too… well, shallow. As a writer, you want to, really throw yourself into the life of your characters to live out the peak moments with them. Including the low periods, as well. If you want to give your fiction an edge of reality and make it ring true in your readers’ ears, you must tackle this important step.

A writer is the best actor/actress of his own story. Let your characters be your director. Step into the spaces where your characters live, mark their footsteps, thread in them boldly. Face your fictional people’s fears and battle their dragons; go from their darkness into greater darkness; fail in their weaknesses until you drop off the lip of reality into a world that could only be magic. Until the spectacular culmination of art where the character wakes to life within you and walks out of your frame to a different plane, a unique personality separate from you and no less alive.

A New York Times review of his novel, Lisey’s Story, quotes Stephen King as saying (about his perspective on writing),

“The question which haunts and nags and won’t completely let go is this one: ‘Who am I when I write?’”

The quote was taken from a 1993 Stephen King essay but in a scene in his novel The Dark Half the main character in his novel makes a similar statement. (Did the author become his character or is his character voicing the writer’s fears?)

Thomas Harris wrote in the foreword to his novel Red Dragon,

‘I want to tell you the circumstances in which I first encountered Hannibal Lecter, M.D…’

Do you sense the urgency in this statement? See how those words push you to believe there might a real walking and breathing, psycho among us and, who goes by that name? Hannibal is a creation of Thomas Harris, a character in his books.

Writers possess more than one soul residing within them and these angle aggressively, for expression. Life often takes drastic twists for a writer; he cannot be one man at every turn of the page. He must not or he’ll lose the very substance which holds him in one piece, bonds his faculty together as a sane entity.

Keep your pen bleeding.


Akpan


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