my imaginary friends

Not long ago, I was venting to a close friend about the fact that I was dreading having to spend time with someone who’s historically negative and, if I’m being honest about it, not particularly nice. You know the type—snaps at waiters, silently appraises you with that awful head-to-toe scan, tosses out backhanded compliments with a big smile on her face. As I bemoaned having to see this person, my friend said, “Doesn’t so-and-so realize you’re a writer?  And that behavior that bad could end up in your next book?” We laughed about it, and I said something along the lines of, “Oh, I’d never do that.”

But that, my friends, is a lie. Because when it comes to creating characters, I steal material from the living, breathing people in my life all the time. In my defense, it’s not all that conscious or intentional, but it of course happens.

When my husband read an early draft of my book, he noticed a paragraph where Waverly, the protagonist, is complaining about the way her boyfriend leaves sections of the newspaper all over the house. “Jerk,” my husband scribbled in the margin. He may or may not also do that. There are aspects of another character’s temperament that remind me of an old friend.

Inventing characters is probably my favorite aspect of fiction writing, of course because it’s the point from which everything else in a story (or my stories) stems, but also because the little details are so much fun. And those little details always come from real life. I once asked an acquaintance who’s from a small Southern town where she grew up and she said something like, “Well, you take a right at the Cracker Barrel and then a left by the Wal-Mart.” I wrote it down the second I got home. (How could I not?) I have notebooks full of this stuff—cryptic notes like “hippy dippy mother” and “she misses the sound of his baseball game in the background” and “cross-country coach with bad stubble and a sweaty yellow tee-shirt” and “woman with a boy’s name” and “never cussed in front of her father” and “local radio station traffic reporter.” I fully realize that if something happens to me and someone finds these notebooks, they will surely—maybe, probably, rightfully—think I was nuts. But it’s these little gems that become the people who become my stories that become my work. It’s not news that writers get so close to their characters that it’s as if they’re real people, but it always takes me by surprise, nevertheless.

For the record, the ones with bad behavior are the most fun to write—not that that’s a warning or anything.