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!
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