Dear Jessica Brennan,
I am currently writing a thriller and I love it. It is very complicated and really difficult which I like, and creating the backstory for the characters and the timelines of their lives takes forever. This book may be years in the making, and that’s okay.
What I know from decades of writing is that creating a story is like slowly remembering something that hasn’t happened yet. You might need to read that again because it doesn’t really make sense in the place most of us live in day to day – “…like slowly remembering something that hasn’t happened yet.”
In the writing process, the characters become dear to you, even the evil ones, and they roam around in your brain even while you sleep. They are like old friends you are meeting for the first time. You don’t remember the specifics, but you know them.
My writing day is usually Sunday, and sometimes I will just sit with a character and ask them “Who are you?” They reply, “You remember”. And eventually I do. How can that be?
The first day I met you, Dear Jessica, I already knew you and you knew me. There was a remembering that was otherworldly. You stared at me as if to say, “You remember”, and I did.
Meeting, learning from, and becoming with these characters has parallels to solid friendship. Forming great relationships takes time and care and a genuine interest in knowing who someone really is.
And when I look back at how I met some of my now old friends, and then subsequently how the relationship formed, it has the same feeling as the book I’m writing. Right from the beginning, the bond transcended time and space and it was like we were remembering each other into a future.
If this is all too strange of a blog to wrap your head around, don’t worry, it is strange to me too. Think about it though. Maybe the people we meet who make us feel like we have always belonged in their world; the ones we can immediately imagine a future with, are the ones we need to pay closest attention to.
The feeling of knowing someone you’ve never met, creating characters that already know you and living out the future like it is already a beautiful memory with someone. So weird but so great.
I love how mind bending it all is.
Love,
Mum xo