A writer’s mind is like a three-ring circus. Villans parade round book circles of intellectuals wielding unconventional weapons. Heroes gallop through, chasing dragons on ice skates. Professors make crucial late-night discoveries, wizards duel to the death, chilors sing. Birds take wing as young couples kiss for the first time under a brilliantly unreal sunset.
All of this happens in about three seconds.
When writing, these characters come to life, personified as letters on the loose leaf page. From the imagination, they swing free to tell their stories to others. It’s the writer’s job to communicate for them, and therefore with them. A bond of sorts is created, between writer and character, and it must be mutual. Only the original creator can known truly what their character thinks and how they would react to something. If the creator is cut off from creation, there is a void remaining.
What does this mean? To the understanding, avid enthusiast- the writer will begin to feel far more insane if their characters cannot talk to them. To the untrained eye, it will appear that this means the writer is no longer “hearing things”. They no longer can blur the line between fantasy and reality. Grounded, surely they will finall by “sane”. They will no longer run off topic as they spot a bird or giggle as they think of something, though the room remained silent. The writer that ignores characters is a “real person.”
Bull.
To the writer themselves, the silenced characters have left them hollow. Their stories will fail without communication, for if you fail to listen to your characters interpretation, you fail to tell the story properly, and you lose the writers soul. Is it therefore a great irony that in discussin the so-called sanity of a person that talks to different creations of theirs in their head, if you were to deprive them of their characters- that is when the writer truly goes insane.
