I mentioned in an off-hand sort of way that I didn’t know the names of characters in my new book. This troubled me on a high level, because I could not explain what that meant. I know now that I was talking about the idea of presence in writing. To me, when you are writing a character you are writing about someone who is in the room with you. Tharsis Drennan, a character from an upcoming fantasy series, is always in the room with me. I know his name, I know his will and feeling, but I don’t know his story, so I haven’t fully written it. His presence is here though. With the characters in the sci-fi story, the Justice Engine they are not yet present. Once they are, I will have a much better time writing this novel. I’ll know them. I’ll realize how it feels to be there with them in the space and to recognize what they would do in the moment. Until then I am writing a biography of someone I never knew or researched.
The reason my mind is thinking of this presence now is because of the few thousand word piece I am writing right now in the voice of a character named Carol K. I know her. Like Tharsis, she’s always in the room with me, cigarette in hand, old cyberleg whirring haltingly as she slides past the bartop to greet another customer. I know every bit of her story, even in not consciously. She is a fully present character in my mind, so when I reach for her voice it is right there, along with her relationships, friendships, and the things that make her what she is. Until you have that, you cannot have character. You need character to tell stories. The more you know that character, the easier the story is to tell, which is why some writers can seemingly write a story so quickly while others struggle to get past the first few pages. That latter group is writing from an image–a glimpse that shot through their mind that they held on to.
The key is to write from character and marry that character to that glimpse. The Justice Engine appeared in glimpses often separated from character, and that is a problem, because it hasn’t quite been filled in by people. It needs to be. I need to marry those images to characters and marry those moments to wants and needs. I need to give myself the time and space to do that.