A writer friend, whom I called Marguerite before, is grappling with feedback on her novel from her agent: the writing's wonderful, the world is fully realised, but although the main character bears much the largest part of the burden of what sounds like a very fascinating novel, he's a bit baffling, and we don't really get to know him. The problem is, says Marguerite, that he is solitary, reclusive, super-defended, perhaps slightly mad, and the reason, and the mainspring of the story, is a mystery in his past.
'In other words, you've given yourself a built-in problem,' I said, as the second instalment of coffee arrived. 'It's something inherent in what you're trying to do: the thing's worth doing, but it's hard to make work. I often find myself pointing that out in editorial reports.'
'Yes,' said Marguerite. 'The thing is, he isn't just not letting the other characters in, or the readers, he's not letting me in. That's why he's come out like that.'
It's the kind of statement which either annoys or fascinates non-writers, and often annoys the more down-to-earth of our brethren too. This character isn't human, after all, it's Margeurite's concoction of scraps from her experience. A puppet, a symbol, a function in a plot, a representation of a human in a medium which itself has no physical existence at all: a story transmitted by black symbols on the page, to be recreated by readers in accordance with a set of rules and customs, as they assemble 'him' from their own scraps of experience.
And yet both writers and readers talk quite casually as if such creatures (in the true sense of 'created beings') are people. I was amazed, dipping into a few textbooks on cognitive science because I was trying to explore how metaphors actually operate in the human mind, to find almost nothing about how the imagination works in creating things which don't exist, rather than merely re-creating, palely and inadequately, things which do. It's as if science has no means of naming or measuring, let alone explaining, the phenomena we conjure every day, and so is disinclined to acknowledge that this phenomenon exists. But no one who's ever spent one, long, adolescent summer's day devouring Jane Eyre or Lord of the Rings could deny that it's a very large phenomenon, and an important one in human experience.
So how will Marguerite get 'him' to let her in? She doesn't know yet. And yet, when she has, and revised the novel because of it, the reader of the new version will know what makes 'him' tick. And the PhD students, the scholarly editors, of the future will be able to track the changes, the shifts and cancellations, the new images and the old phrases, and talk technical about why and how they work. But will Marguerite be thinking in those terms? Yes, at one level: she decides on the words. But what guides that decision? What she now knows about this man, which she didn't before. And to do that she had to think like someone trying to befriend a lonely neighbour. What was the key to him? Where is the crack in his armour or the place where the skin is thinnest, the thing about which or for which he would reach out? And then she knew, and what she knew has become black marks on a page.
The phenomenon may have a technical outcome - these words not those - but it's not, actually, a process amenable to technical analysis, only one of choosing - perhaps for technical reasons - between different words which appear in our minds by means of a power we don't understand. The reason we talk in seemingly fanciful ways about these people who aren't people is that ultimately we have no other way of finding and controlling our creative capacities: in creating characters who seem like real people the only mental system we have is the one we've developed for finding and dealing with real people. As I was meditating in Singing the Story, all writers know that metaphors - figurative language - can reach the parts of a reader which nothing else can. Perhaps what we're really doing with our airy-fairy, fancy talk about characters who get away from us, is using a metaphor of real people to reach the parts of our writerly self which nothing else can.
