Power of stories: Characters have a life of their own

Meera Jacob
I was twenty-two the first time a character in one of my stories did something completely unexpected. I remember because I was in college, typing away on what must have been a computer (though in memory it is the size of a mini-fridge) and because the deviation came on so fast, with such slick precision that I barely realized it was a deviation at all.Delia was supposed to get on a bus, and now here she was, three full paragraphs later, sitting in a diner in Cleveland and ordering something she was scared to eat. But why? What on earth had just happened? Though it would take me years to actually believe it, I knew the answer right away: Because she wanted to.
Though initially I was wary of allowing my characters so much power, a few years later, I knew for sure that my best stories happened when I was sitting on the side, frantically typing it all down. For me, this is the real magic of writing fiction: that I can be creator, conduit, and bystander all at once. Where else can you do that but in your dreams?
Still, admitting to this kind of thing can make a writer sound loony, or lazy, or (worst of all) pretentious. Even as I write this, I can feel my maternal grandfather—a man of heavy eyebrows and short temper, who forbid my mother to read fiction on the grounds that it was “ridiculous”—harrumphing from the grave. I can only imagine how frivolous he would find my line of work, and now I admit it’s not even really me who wields the power? Yes, I suppose I do. I also know for a fact that I’m not alone in this. I’ve talked to enough writers to confirm that they, too, let their characters take control of their stories, that they, too, are surprised by the resulting turns the narrative takes.
And yet here is another truth, one that so many of us seem to have stumbled into at one time or another: our characters are not to be trusted. They’re power hogs, you see. Gluttons for attention. My story, one will say, tugging in one direction. No, mine, another will counter, whispering some particularly delicious detail to drive the story off the rails. I learned the hard way that if you give a character too much power, you are likely to be caught in back channels and side stories forever. In my debut novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, I spent entire weeks chasing down scenes that never made it to the bound page, and even lost a whole year to an unfortunate dalliance in Serbia. (To this day, I cannot think about the Balkans without shaking my head and muttering, “2007”.) Even now, as I turn to the business of writing a second novel, I’m unsure of how long it will take me—not because I don’t have another story in me, but rather because I have too many, told to me by feverishly competing voices.
So what’s a writer to do, in light of all this? Throw out the keyboard? Admit that writing fiction is a silly profession? Let one’s dead grandfather harrumph them into embarrassed silence once and for all? Not a chance. Because even if my power as writer is a fickle one, even if it wanders into the lives characters and comes back to me with side-stories, even if I lose years to a chapter that doesn’t make it to the final draft, the very act of creating, of listening and sympathizing, of daring to waste my time on something “ridiculous” changes something inside me. It rearranges me, makes room for something bigger than just the sum of my words. It turns sitting at a desk into an act of compassion, one that repeats itself as I sit in the subway car, imagining the woes of strangers, and then later as I sit reading in my own bed, my heart split open by someone else’s novel. And really, is there anything more powerful than that?
(Mira Jacob will speak at the Times Litfest on Dec 5-7)