Getting to Know People Who Never Existed
Or why fiction — and dreams — matter
At 13 I drafted my first — and currently, only — complete novel. It was a boilerplate sci-fi romp, indicative of the apocalyptic fever-rush of the impending turn of the 21st Century, though well before the Y2K scare and in limp anticipation of movies like Independence Day. It was also fueled by a steady stream of my cultural curriculum in middle school — first, the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, then in step my with emerging adolescence, the entirety of the Dune series, for better or worse. While others were reading Goosebumps, I was delving into dubious, futuristic messiahs and an order of “sisters” who used a kind of sexual jujitsu to manipulate their way to the top of the political heap. For a 12-year-old, this was highly titillating, and I couldn’t help but share the “naughty” bits of these books with my peers in class. We might as well have been passing around issues of Hustler in full view of the teacher, for all the thrill it gave us.
Despite this, my novel held little, if any of the adult cynicism I experienced, but did not fully understand, from the Dune series. Heavily entrenched in sci-fi conventions as it was, it took more in spirit from Lord of the Rings. Though most of my characters were tragically flawed in one way or another, there was a sense of righteousness to almost everything they did, a pure purpose that had not been tainted by greed or political corruption. It was not a novel I could write today.
And yet I tried. In high school, I revisited my novel more than once, and foolishly, my Internal Editor raging, I attempted to give the work some respectability, to provide it with some real-world political nuance and a sense of context. It was a fruitless, heartless endeavor. I soon abandoned it, realizing, if only unconsciously, that I was stripping the soul from something my less jaded self had created.
It has been years since I looked at that manuscript. It was likely lost in a transfer from one computer to another, and lies unrecoverable in some half-destroyed hard drive in a junk heap. Though some important plot points remain clear in my mind, what resonates most are the characters. One particular passage comes to mind: “She had the most beautiful eyes.” A simple enough statement, but for me it conjures a clear image of a woman in a windblown field of wheat, eyes glimmering with compassion, an open, knowing smile on her lips. The image is so clear in my head that no amount of description could sufficiently explain it. Many images like this hover in my memory, divorced from the passages I wrote to describe them, which I have long since forgotten. The images and the people that populate them are clear enough that they might as well be memories.
What does this say about the nature of memory? Of consciousness? Or at least of my memories, my consciousness? A couple of years ago I was enrolled in an intensive language study program. As a precursor to the program, we were invited to take a series of personality tests to determine the best method for us to learn a foreign language. If I remember correctly, one of these tests was SLOAN, also known as the Big Five or Global Five. The test consisted of several parts, including word-pair associations which you identified with on a sliding scale, and a series of statements that you rated, also on a sliding scale, for accuracy on how well they described you. Many of these statements seemed similar to something you would find on Myers-Briggs or other personality tests, but others were unusual and strangely candid, for example, “I love a good fight,” and the one I remember most clearly: “I have trouble discerning dreams from reality.”
After the test, I overheard a few of my classmates discussing that very statement. They saw it as an absurd thing to put on a personality test, not only strange, but unnecessary, as though any answer but a firm “definitely not me” would suggest that you were bordering on the edge of psychosis. It’s an understandable reaction. To admit there may be a thin veil at times between your perception and reality can leave a person vulnerable to a punishing barrage of self-doubt if left unchecked. I kept my opinions on the statement to myself, because I had rated it as a fairly accurate description of how I (sometimes) feel, and I didn’t want to come across as coo-coo. I am sure most people have had moments where they had to ask themselves whether something they remembered had actually happened to them, or if it had occurred in a dream. My guess is it happens to me more often than the average person.
This statement about perception, according to the Big Five personality test, is designed to measure the framework of a person’s intellect, or at least that is what I glean from how the test is structured. Strong agreement with it and similar statements suggests a highly inquisitive and creative mind. I scored fairly highly in this category, as well as being accommodating (the “A” in “SLOAN”), suggesting that I typically take others’ needs and interests into account before my own. So how then does this relate to me remembering characters I created as though they were long-lost friends from my past? Characters that I feel a responsibility not to alter in a significant way, as though they are autonomous beings deserving of their own rights and personalities?
One answer may be the function of mirror neurons in the brain, and how they relate to empathy. There has been a great deal of hype related to this fascinating concept, fueled in part by neuroscientists like VS Ramachandran, despite the majority of research on the subject being performed in monkeys, and the possibility that mirror neurons do not even exist in human brains. Regardless, there is evidence to suggest that a system in the brain activates when we watch another person perform an action or someone tells us a story, and that system, which seeks to mimic what we are experiencing through mental imagery, allows us to feel greater empathy for others. There is even a recent study suggesting that a sense of power over others may weaken the activation of this system.
If this last study holds weight, it would on the surface seem to create a paradox for a writer who bears responsibility for the integrity of people who never existed. All writing, fiction in particular, has the potential to manipulate, to shape character, to coerce. Such power, even if it only occurs in a fictional realm, would seem to destroy empathy given the study’s assumption. Many writers, however, do no approach their characters as some overarching deity molding playthings out of clay. Developing a character is more like getting to know someone for the first time. As Joyce Carol Oates says, there is no way of knowing who your character is right off the bat — you have to “listen” to them. Like any person you meet for the first time, you are bound to make assumptions about them, about who they will be and where their future might lead them. If you’re honest and willing to explore their world, though, they’re bound to surprise you. So this may be why my characters exist so vividly in a manufactured memory. I had to learn their story, and in doing I engaged in a kind of empathy that left an indelible mental image.
I am terrible at remembering names, but I rarely forget a face. The first time I meet someone, an image of them will forever be linked to the place where I met them. I remember the temperature of the room, the lighting, maybe what music is playing in the background. Sometimes a smell. But unless something remarkable happens or I have some context, the name slips away. That is probably why today, after all these years, the characters in my first novel are only acquaintances. I can see many of them so clearly and remember where I first met them, but without the manuscript in front of me I have forgotten most of their names. I sometimes think about them, where they might be today in the midst of the aftermath of the apocalypse, who made it, who was eaten by mutants, who had children and what they might look like. These are only passing thoughts, however. There is a new novel now, new people to explore and get to know. I will likely never see those other characters again.
You may ask why I have invested so much head space wondering about people who never existed, when there are all those real people out there. For one, it’s not exactly voluntary. When I was younger, I would say it was because I was lonely, an only child for many years, and grappling with a shyness towards my peers that left me with few friends. (Adults were easy for me to talk to, but they were still adults.) In fiction I met a multitude of engaging people, explored continents with them, helped save the world with them against anthropomorphic computer viruses. It even acted as a kind of palliative against the specter of grade school injustice. I fashioned an earlier story, and a character, after a friend of mine, a kid named Ian, who was ridiculed at school for being “weird” and generally looked down upon. Through fiction, I turned his strangeness into an asset — he was an alien from another planet, using his unique abilities to save the human race. Looking back, I realize that Ian was kind of a bully, even to me, possibly acting out in response to a shaky situation at home. There were probably several good reasons I was blind to for why people didn’t like him. But I was young and desperate for friends, and didn’t know any better. At the time I don’t think I knew why I wrote that story. Twenty-four years on, it looks like I was trying to make sense of the world.
I’ve pretty much grown out of my shyness, and I have friends and am generally okay with myself, as much as anyone can be. So I guess I keep getting to know people who don’t exist to make sense of the world. I groaned audibly for a about a year during the Memoir Mania of the early 00s, and the furor against James Frey when it came out that A Million Little Pieces was a work of fiction cast as, well, anything but. Certainly it was a betrayal of the reader’s trust, which is inexcusable, and unnecessary from a marketing standpoint, since Dave Eggers had fictionalized his own memoir, a commercial and critical success, a few years earlier to trade factual accuracy for storytelling power. What struck me, though, was how people who had read Pieces and loved it suddenly had no use for the book, as though any sense of catharsis or inspiration they found from a story about a recovering addict was lost when the story was no longer “true.” Remember folks: writing is manipulative. Even the most factual memoir will be fine-tuned in such a way to maximize your entertainment, or to tug your heart strings, or to advance the writer’s or publisher’s political agenda. These are always spins on some sort of truth, whether fictional or not. If those mirror neurons of yours start activating and you associate with overcoming the demons of addiction against seemingly impossible odds, does it really matter if the story you just read actually happened?
So I will not apologize for remembering my characters as people I once knew, or for sometimes thinking I’ve met a person I have only seen in dreams. I don’t care if I sound coo-coo. My head is not stuck in the clouds. If exploring the life of a character gives me insight into a piece of humanity I could not have found otherwise, if it brings me closer to people through some deeper sense of empathy, then I feel I am as entrenched in reality as I can be. And if I’m really lucky, maybe others who get to meet my characters in the future will feel the same. If you have never written fiction or creative non-fiction, even if you think you are a horrible writer, I challenge you to try. You may meet someone you may not have otherwise met. And you’re almost guaranteed to meet a new part of yourself, too.
