Writing as passion.

I’d rather just write.

Maybe I don’t know how to organize my time, but the way I see it there isn’t enough time to organize. Either way, another semester has started, and I’m already in the thick of it. And characters are left trapped on the page.

The Red Man is left in his red jumpsuit and red ball cap standing on his roof waving at Jonathan as drives to work, his car filling with worship songs.

I call this static motion.

Another character’s thoughts exist only in my head: I’m left with no choice but to plan my sleepless existence. The girl I loved, the girl who left me, she showed up in my doorway in the middle of the night. I saw her like you see yourself in the mirror. She appeared to me as the ghost image of herself. Yet my eyes saw her physical, material body. Yet she was only there, up in my head.

I call this borrowed consciousness. His thoughts stumbling around in my head. Doesn’t seem fair.

What’s worse is the collaborative efforts that are now pending: one focuses on a stripper, the other a prostitute. (That realization is striking.) Don’t worry; the stories are about so much more. And in Amelia’s defense, she doesn’t stay a stripper for long. As for Veronica, her story is a satire about what we find ourselves settling for. They have stories to tell just like anyone else.

I love the openness, the ambiguity, the mystery, the playfulness that comes with creating characters.

In my only published (and award-winning!) story, Cursed, the interpretation of the main character/narrator varies depending on who reads it. The gender of the character, it turned out, was left undefined. It took my gracious and beautiful editor to see this. (Oh, the power of other eyes on one’s work! Truly, the more people who read your writing, the better it will become. This is a fact that I will always hold to.)

I didn’t leave the gender open deliberately. Though, when I realized I did, I teased it a bit, played with it, and added a thing or two that might suggest a thing or two about the character.

This, creating characters, is one of the great joys of storytelling. You can do anything.