Friday, while picking up a friend and eating with her at a restaurant, a character downloaded into my mind. When I say "downloaded" what I mean is that every detail of her life and personality appeared in my mind without any effort on my behalf. It felt like I was receiving information from a source beyond. After that I was compelled to write the story of this character. After dinner, at approximately seven o'clock, I sat down at my laptop and started typing. I typed with barely a break until 2:30 Sunday morning. During this time the story flowed from this outside source into my mind and on to the page. I ended up with a 24,000 word story and I was done. I went to bed. On Sunday, I organized the story into chapters, then read it to my writing coach and made changes she suggested. However, her changes were minor. This is the fewest changes she's ever suggested in a story. Now, the story is done. Does anyone else experience the writing process this way? As if, you're not the creator of the content, but a receiver and conduit?
Wow, congratulations! I love it when that happens. Last time I went on such a writing rush must have been back in 2012 or 2013. Yeah, I get that feeling a lot, that the entire world I am making has been beamed into my head by some outside source. Perhaps aliens looking to take over and use me as a conduit to introduce our world to their society through books and movies... hehe, nah not likely, but still those are the kind of thoughts I get sometimes. It does feel like I couldn't have made it all up on my own, and I suppose that is partially true, since I merely stand on the imagination of others and take it in my own direction.
All of the time. Sometimes I almost feel like they are there telling me their life story. One of my characters in my WIP is met as a slave, my MC buys her, and she goes north, spending a lot of time with his wife. She finally opens up and tells about losing her first child to plague, her second is still-born during a drought, her husband is killed along with the other men in her tribe in a humiliating way by the empire my MC serves and she is raped and hauled off to slavery. When I wrote her story I felt like she was telling it to me and I cried like a baby committing her story to paper because I could feel her pain. I felt and still feel like I didn't create her...she created herself. All the details were just "downloaded" and I wrote and recorded them.
Not exactly. The closest equivalent for me would be when various ideas I've been casually thinking about come together to form one whole concept - like a puzzle where I suddenly realize how the pieces fit together. When it comes to characters I usually start with a basic archetype or template: "I want my main character to be sorta like this." Usually I will base them on an existing character from media I consume but I'll make changes that I think would be interesting, merge two or more of them together, switch out personalities, change genders and so on. This tends to give me an idea of what kind of story they're suited for and what themes I'll be working with, and then I refine them further by giving them specific traits, backstories, etc.
I was thinking about this question yesterday and think that I have some reasons other than OMG ALIENS!!...I study a lot of period history from many different time periods so I probably subconsciously "channel" the myriad of stories I have from real people. There is a good chance that some of my characters experiences are in part based on real life people or events. So my "downloading" experience is probably more a draw from my own databank of knowledge than a mystical experience.
That's kinda crazy, I don't think I've ever experienced something like that, no. But the part about writing non-stop? Yeah, sure. Sometimes it all just kind of clicks together and my hands type at 90 words per minute. Other times, like right now, I write 100 words per hours and nearly nothing gets done. It's like I have a blockage in my brain, sigh... Characters write themselves sometimes, Ray Bradbury said this about the characters from Fahrenheit 451. I remember seeing it in the afterword of the edition I ended up with, and I never really understood what he meant to be honest. How can a character write themselves? My best guess on this one is how a lot of the time writers either write and expand on a personal experience, they follow that flow subconsciously at times, and the character doesn't end up as initially imagined — so they write themselves. Again, just a guess.
These things seem utterly alien to me. My stories take the forms they do because of decisions I made while writing. I have never been able to memorize 25,000 words worth of material. The maximum amount that I have ever been inspired to write is around two chapters or 5000 words. When I did this, I couldn't believe how inspired I was, but when I wrote down the stories the following day I found that I had repeated the same structure over and over again. I had not composed two full chapters I had written a mini-chapter and duplicated it over and over in my mind. I know damn well that I never written at 90 words a minute when typing a story. I have timed myself writing and found that I write at 15 words a minute when I actually type stories. Most of this time is spent deciding how to phrase sentences, correcting typos, pacing a story, and deciding how a story is going to go. It's not like writing for a typing program that measures your typing speed. In such programs, you type out pre-written passages so there is no time spent on composition. The bulk of my writing time is spent on composition.
Even to say we download, or receive, our characters is vain. They are real, we aren't. We think we're writing them, when they're writing us. Did we ever make a story character do something? Perhaps to visit the grocery shop and buy some coffee for us? To help us at least stay awake? To take the dustbins out? Ridiculous. But the other way around... They put our lives on hold. They make us type set numbers of words a day, or even -ha!- make millionaires of us so we can't escape them. It's a very one-sided deal: they endure forever while we diminish into a name on the dustjacket, and eventually not even that. Noah, Cinderella - the great characters slough off their mortal authors. Part of their parasitic dominion over the human spirit is letting us think we're in control. Most writers, on web forums, claim they are designing characters and carefully selecting their every action to fit the "arc", or the themes - or whatever other metaphysical pretences. But the fiction -obviously- is what isn't real and doesn't happen. We control them in fiction, while they control us in reality: and the unfairness of this substitution, of the real for the unreal, is what shows us that we're at the bum end of the exchange. But it could be worse. Some people have to stare out the window waiting to be useful to one of these monsters. Others mindlessly fill drawers, shelves, and finally the house with scrawling and are only dug out at the end of their lives by their relatives. And even they aren't the worst-off. Terrifyingly, this ontological pyramid has a basement level: the poor saps we writers cause to read.
I don't see how any of this adds up. You've openly admitted that fiction isn't real; so how can the characters in it be real? Would you mind explaining how a being that possesses no concrete existence, and exists only as an idea in our minds can be real?
This extremely brief wikipedia entry may help others on the site to understand my post, my sense of humour, and the general deficiency of the world in its only being a shadow - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism#Platonism_and_neoplatonism A brief exposition of one approach might be that Cinderella is more real than the children her story is told to. Every little girl who grows up and finds love is an echo of Cinderella. She isn't in their minds but outside them in whatever we call the place where the real things are. They can't change her, but she changes them every time her story is told. There's an ontological argument against concreteness, too, which goes back to a similar era to Plato, when the debate was about atoms-or-not. We can no longer answer the atomists as Aristotle did with four continuous elements, but we can now wonder at a quark's extending infinitely along an axis. Nearly all of what we think is concrete is empty, and the stuff suspended in the emptiness isn't stuff we can stick a fork in.
Are psychedelics a requirement of philosophy? I'm just kidding. We have a few other members that wax this kind of thing and it's great.
I've read Plato and I think you're misinterpreting his work. Cinderella is not a platonic form. Platonic forms are abstract, universals which are defined through logic and pure reason. Cinderella is a particular person not a universal. So she isn't a Platonic form. Plato had a fairly low opinion of writing and the arts. In the opening of book 10 of the Republic, Plato argues that just as concrete reality is a bad copy of the ideal forms, art, which he argues mimics reality, is a bad copy of reality. It's even farther from the perfect rationality of forms than reality. It's also worth noting that Plato was not a solipsist. He believed that concrete reality existed, even if it is an irrational and flawed copy of the world of forms.
I don't think I've interpreted Plato here at all - but if he was that much of a stick-in-the-mud let's leave him in the 5th Century where he's happiest, and try to cobble together a modern Platonist idealism with a higher view of the arts. Socrates was Plato's tutor, and I'm sure he didn't have a low opinion of the arts - one of the only things we know about him is that he stood up in the audience to cheer at a play What if we contend that Cinderella is a similar sort of thing to the 'daimon', and that the 'daimon' is the Form of the human, to which the Intellect refers when it's deciding - I don't know - who to marry, or what shoes to pick On what I've put forward, Cinderella isn't the work of art - the little girls are. She's their author - to some extent - perhaps the daimon in disguise, or a proxy it uses when it's busy. For the really simple stuff. Surely she isn't a particular person - because she's expressed so differently in every re-telling, with no Disney or Netflix to tell us which are canonical. And if she's not universal, that's not her fault (anymore than it's Poseidon's fault that some people don't know what an oar is) - it's the fault of people like Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping - she's as close as we'll get to it A Neoplatonist theory-of-art might be interesting to bring in, too: Ephesians 2:10 compares God to a writer putting poems in a work=book=collection. We could even read it as: "For we are His characters [poiema], created in Christ Jesus for good stories [ergois], which God prepared beforehand, that we should wander [peripatesomen] in them." (ESV with alternate usages marked in italics). Peripatesomen is nice here, as it might have a third alternate reading as a reference to the Peripatetic School descending from Socrates - some of us wander in the sense that we sin, others by being philosophers. But then back to the OP too. If it's anything like this, of course we'd feel a sensation of something 'downloading' when it happens: just like the computers probably feel when they have to show us what % of our document's been saved.
I prefer to think of characters, the ones that come alive anyway, as more like Jungian archetypes than Platonic Ideals, but they're very closely related, and I believe the 'other world' Plato referred to was the unconscious. I don't really like discussing this publicly though, because I don't claim any objective knowledge about it. It's something that's discovered as you go forward (I'm a discovery writer by nature). I can only say 'It seems to me'. It seems to me that something in our minds (or somewhere) is capable of spontaneously creating characters and scenarios, else how could we dream? Let's call it the unconscious, or at least some part of it. Whatever it may be, it's not something we have conscious control over, more like something we submit ourselves to if we're willing to let go and stop micromanaging a story strictly consciously. It's sort of like how, after thoroughly learning to ride a bike, you can sometimes give up conscious control, especially for instance when about to crash, and something inside takes over and fixes things too fast for you to understand what's happening. But even at ordinary moments you can let the autopilot take over and just glide along, with no conscious thought given to braking or turning, just let those things happen as they will. You supply only a desire to 'go this way' or a curiosity about 'What's down this road?' Yes, you can dictate consciously every action and decision in a story, and every aspect of every character. Micromanagement in general is a bad approach, it's often far better to make sure your employees and managers are well trained and experienced and let them make decisions. When I'm writing there's what seems to be a push/pull between these 2 approaches. To some extent I try things, sort of like dictating but more suggestions than commands. What if they try this? What happens? So I let it play out, perhaps in my mind alone at first, where there's fairly low resolution. I get a vague idea of how each character would react in the scene, but I don't get a higher resolution idea until I write it, at least in beat form or what I call loose outlining. And the highest resolution happens of course when writing it out completely. However, this is one of those highly divisive topics like religion or politics where there are essentially two opposing camps. Some refuse to believe that characters can live in the mind and make their own decisions, while some have no problem with it. For me it works, though at times I find myself writing more like a micromanager (though not a heavy-handed one) and at times letting go and allowing whatever is inside to do its thing. You lose some control, which requires having some faith. But usually what happens when I give up control is far better than what I would have come up with otherwise. Discovery writing.
I also believe that people who say they consciously decide everything are doing this to some extent and just not aware of it. I mean, there's a reason it's called the unconscious—it does its work below the threshold of conscious awareness. It takes over frequently and allows us to daydream while driving or similar things.
In fact what I'm describing is closely related to what's known as Imaginal Dialogue, where you can summon a group of people, including ones you've known as well as characters from movies or TV shows, celebrities, etc, to a sort of round table discussion and ask them questions. This works better for some people than others, I suppose depending on your level of imagination, or susceptibility to the unconscious. I used to do this while mowing the lawn, when there was nothing else to do but think and it was too loud for earphones. I found some characters would 'take', would speak up and have a lot to say, and some just sat there like lumps. Apparently your mind has the capability to model many different personality types. Not just for dreaming, I don't think it's strictly unconscious, but more like a union of it with the conscious. I used to invite people like Sherlock Holmes, certain wise teachers I had known, Jung and Freud (Freud was generally a nasty stick-in-the-mud or refused to speak at all). I'd play the interviewer, asking a question and then imaging one of them giving an answer. In a way I'm just speaking through them, but you'll find they start saying unexpected things. This is when the unconscious begins to speak through them. This is sort of an exercise—it allows you to step outside of your habitual persona and exercise normally unused parts of the mind, or parts only accessed occasionally through your normal persona. But of course if it's Jung answering, you're going to get a much different answer than if it's you. As I understand it, we have all this normally untapped potential in us that can be accessed through exercises like this. Here's a PDF book about imaginal dialogues: INVISIBLE GUESTS - The Development of Imaginal Dialogues
I just realized it's also a way actors discover characters inside themselves. They say it has to be something you find inside yourself or it isn't authentic, and yet it isn't the actor's usual personality. It's like a completely different person.
