I’m Haunted

I’m haunted, but not by a ghost.¹  It’s a character in the novel I started last November for NaNoWriMo.  And by started last November, I actually mean I started thinking about it Summer 2006–that very thoughtful Summer between college graduation and the start of graduate school.

It doesn’t take four years to write a novel.  Though I’d been thinking about my first novel at least that long by the time I finally finished it, the writing itself only took a couple months.  One advantage to this slow and distracted approach is that the characters get to live inside your head for so long that they start to feel like real people you once knew.  Sometimes you find that weeks and months have passed since you last thought of them, but there’s always the opportunity to get reacquainted.  You might just find they’ve changed in your time apart.

This character’s name is August.²  He existed for years with simple motivations and an undeveloped personality.  He was the stupid guy who broke the girl’s heart and would later come to regret it.  The story wasn’t even about him.  It was about her.  And it was so simple that after that first Summer, I never intended to actually write it.

But, then, this Summer, I started to think about the story again.  Maybe it was my desire to write about grad students.  Maybe I was bankrupt of ideas and so forced to pick up stories I’d thought of years ago.  Maybe these characters have some kind of power over me.  Whatever reason, I started thinking of this story I’d abandoned and suddenly August became a real character and he changed the whole story.

The story became much more emotionally complex and the result was two characters yelling in my head, fighting with each other at a volume I could not ignore and didn’t want to, because it was so interesting to me.³  My experience writing fiction is that some scenes, some characters, some motivations come out of nowhere and the rest you piece together like a puzzle, trying different pieces to see what fits.  But, unlike a puzzle, the end product is not already determined.  It could be anything.

I’ve struggled a lot with how to tell this story and in developing plot points aside from the major emotional core.  When not knowing where to go next combined with business and a lack of self-discipline, I gave up on NaNoWriMo.  But, I didn’t give up on the story and I find myself thinking of it more and more.

Lately, August is in my head.  He has a broken heart, the poor guy.⁴  And he haunts my fiction-filled life.

1. Though I can’t tell you how much 13 year old me wished her dad would move into a scary old mansion, so that I could be haunted by a Devon Sawa-looking Casper, who would ask me, “Can I keep you?” [↩]
2. I intended for his name to be ridiculous.  It says more about his parents than him.  But, after you repeat a name for a couple years, you forget how weird it is. [↩]
3. I’ve written about 15 drafts of that fight, which is approximately 13 more than I normally write of anything. [↩]
4. I sound like a crazy person. I don’t walk down the street talking to these characters, I swear. [↩]