Characters, Comas, & Causes

For anyone who has ever written a  novel or listened to someone talk about writing a novel, characters really tend to write themselves. It's not as if you can assign any old life story or attribute to any given character, because they already exist. It's just the writer's job to put on paper and breathe that life into them. 

Yesterday, during my fourth "go" at it, I met the most interesting main character I have come across yet. A woman who knows that she is in a coma and can hear the inter-workings of the hospital room around her, but cannot signal that she is in fact awake inside.  The story to me sounds riveting at this point, should I be able to take this gargantuan task on.  But I have no idea where this came from! I have never been in a coma; I have never even personally known anyone in a coma. I know nothing about medicine or hospitals, and the only understanding I have of what goes on between hospital staff when they are not aiding the ill is what I have seen on television.  Yet here I am, with this unnamed girl who knows her own story and is relying on me to tell it.  Which means the next step for me is research.  For academic papers, I have researched. For creative writing, I have not. I am looking forward to this merging of two different interests to create an understanding force capable of helping along the two pages that are my novel.  In the same way, I think I am actually starting to get excited about character development!

A Novel Idea

Welcome to the spring semester, folks, friends, & followers. This semester, my love of English has driven me to attempt what at one time seemed possible.  I signed up for a seminar in "Writing A Novel".  I love to read and I love to write, but the things I dabble in are blog entries, academic papers, and most importantly, poetry.  The most wonderful thing about poetry is that it is short, sweet, and to the point. Even "long" poems are only a few pages at best. Now, do not misunderstand: I am not speaking of epics or sonnets, here. I am talking short, Emily Dickinson-inspired, metaphor-packed lines of poetry.  I have been writing poetry since I was five years old and through my years of schooling and reading, my voice has changed many times.  By studying the work of numerous other poets both renown and scarcely known,  I have learned to experiment with style, word choice, message, format, and length.  But through all of this, the thing that has remained consistent is that I am a woman of few words. I am not used to having to spell things out for readers, because people that read poetry generally appreciate the creative license to interpret what speaks to them at the moment of reading it. Never in my career as a writer have I needed to develop a character, come up with a plot, or explain a conflict.

The biggest problem that I face as of yet, standing at the edge of the Novel world: I do not know how to make things up. Everything I have ever written I have written about  is something that really happened to me, or a real emotion that I have felt.  I understand this old writer's adage about "write what you know," but as far as my personal life, there is not quite enough substance to write an entire novel.  I stick to poetry because it can be delightfully specific to situations or feelings and as such, they tend to be more fleeting than pages and pages of one story that develops and grows and entices. I am in awe of The Novelist, I always have been.  Today is the third day of the course and I have started four different story lines already.