So which one are you?

“Your aunt is a very lucky woman Angelica. She has two lives. The life she is living, and the book she is writing.” –The Hours

Based on yesterday’s post on names, let me say that one of the things I admire about Jane Austen is that she had characters named Jane. Neither Jane Bennett nor Jane Fairfax seemed to be particularly similar to Jane in personality (I tend to imagine her as a bit more like Elizabeth Bennett, with a bit of Anne Elliott.)

I can never name anyone Gina. I mean, it is probably not as common a name now as “Jane” would have been in Regency England, but still, it just feels like saying “That’s me!” And I don’t want to say that.

With this Jane, I never thought of Jane Austen, or my dog, or anything like that. I wanted the name to be kind of simple and sweet—not fancy—and that’s kind of how the Simpson got there too, with no reference to Springfield’s favorite family. However, once I had Simpson I remembered my 9th grade biology teacher, so I decided Jane’s middle name could be Lenore, though there are no particular connections between the teacher and the plot either. She was cool though, and we had good field trips.

The other question though, and it is worth looking at, is how much of any of the characters are the author. I kind of hinted at this a little with Bigg City Heroes, but with my novel, “Cara”, most of the people in there started out as someone too, including Cara herself.

One thing you quickly see is that even as you start writing based on someone, they start changing and becoming their own people.  Also, at least for me, I usually don’t start based on someone real, and I don’t automatically base the female lead on myself. This is basically my way of saying that Jane is not me.

I’m a little defensive about that. Part of the awkwardness there is Jane’s relationship with Gerard, because remember, I have this taboo against being attracted to married men, and so I would not want to give the impression that I am into him that way, but also, not only is Jane not me, but Gerard is not Gerard. He looks a lot like him, but he became his own person too. They all did. They have different backgrounds, and the age ranges ended up being a little different, and new characters came in who were not anyone at all, but were still so real, and that’s great. That’s one of the most amazing things about writing, is how things come into being.

Now, it’s not like that for everyone. If an author has different main characters in every story, but they feel somewhat interchangeable, then you may have something different going on. There was an old sitcom, “The Single Guy” where Jonathan Silverman was an author and at one point he was dating a critic who gave him a scathing review. One of her criticisms was that the protagonist was a thinly-disguised version of himself, which he denied, and so she read the description of the character as he was looking into a mirror (horrible device for putting out a description), and Silverman was looking in the mirror, unconsciously mimicking, himself, I guess. I do not want to be that guy.

I also look askance as writers whose characters are always writers, because, really? But LM Montgomery made both Emily and Anne writers, and yet they were clearly different from each other. (”Journalist” doesn’t count as a writer, because that can function similarly to making the protagonist a detective.) I know they say to write what you know, but that’s a really good reason to know more than one thing. You need to be able to imagine lots of different things, and lots of different ways of being.

At the same time, this is where everyone is sort of you, because you can only write what you can conceive. Sometimes that might be because you have lived it, or observed it, or saw something kind of similar and then added some “what ifs”, but you need to have kind of a broad view. In that way, sure, Jane is me, but so is everyone else.

I think this might be why I sometimes come up with an idea for a story with a really cool, in control kind of character, maybe someone kind of like James Bond, and then it never goes anywhere. Maybe I can’t get into the head of someone smooth. Give me someone with messy emotions or weaknesses or fears, and then it all just springs to life. They aren’t always my particular weaknesses; maybe I’ve known someone with them, or read about them, or just imagined how it would feel, but it has a resonance that feels real, and so it works, and that character works.

I think one of the most important personal attributes for a writer (beyond language skills) is empathy—to be able to feel what things are like, and would be like, and could be like.

This has its downside. I feel things a lot when I am writing. I have said Jane is not me, and even more emphatically, Jane’s parents are not based on my parents. Also, I was writing out of sequence anyway. That being said, the reason I wrote the scene where Jane’s mother dies when I did was because I would be on my way home on the train, and I would keep going into the scene, and starting to cry because it was so sad for Jane and I needed to exorcise that scene from my brain by writing it out. Yes, I had to rewrite it, and will need to do so again, but for the actual pain part, the first writing tends to be the most important.

It isn’t just bad emotions. There are good emotions too, and I get glimpses of the feelings of first love and ecstasy and relief and warmth. It would be very easy to just always live in worlds of my own making, though I think they would lose their quality in time. On my own, I need to make sure that I spend time in the real world, and with real people.

I think this could be a real pitfall for actors too. They’re not only bringing up the emotions and motivations, they are going through the physical movements. Obviously, they need to have their own safeguards in place, and if they don’t, this could result in sad little lives, disaffection, or serial costar relationships. I wouldn’t want to be a part of that either.

I guess what I most hope for is that I produce a good read or movie that people enjoy, and then they go live better, and if I didn’t help them, at least I didn’t hurt them. Ambitious!