Writing a novel is a long, hard, wonderful process that takes a toll on you mentally (and physically if you stare at screen for too long). I started writing my first novel while I was in high school and I’m currently working on the sequel. I love writing and I love my characters and their stories, but to be honest, it has broken my brain. Now in all fairness, it’s not exactly like my brain was a fully functioning machine beforehand. I suffer from anxiety, insomnia, and other such things. Nonetheless, creating a universe and the people who inhabit it broke it on a whole new level.
As I’m sure any avid readers know when you read about a character long enough that character can start to seem real to you. You develop attachments, you wonder about how he or she would handle situations you are handling, and you begin to speculate about what he or she does between books or what happened before his or her stories began. I can tell you that when you’re the one who creates the characters and who writes down their stories you get that experience and much more. After spending years building and testing these characters, they have become distinct, almost real people in my mind. As alarming as that might sound, I assure you I’m not crazy. They aren’t voices in my head telling me to do things. More accurately, they are like old friends. I know everything about them whether it’s relevant to the story or not. I know how they would react to situations and how they feel about issues both important and frivolous. I know their morals and their motives. Rather than have my heroes be unwaveringly good and my villains be ruthlessly evil like so many stories, there’s a lot of gray areas. I can do this because, to me, they’re like real people I could turn to and ask about things.
Aside from my characters being like my own little writer’s room, I also know their lives before and beyond where my novel begins. I know all about their families, their childhoods, and the events that made them who they are. It’s like how everyone has that one friend they’ve been friends with since they were little kids and you can essentially finish their sentences for them. Bizarrely enough, there are things about them floating around my brain that have nothing to do with the story or how they live in it but they’re important to them, so they exist. This can bog things down and lead me down pointless rabbit holes that I end up erasing, but it makes my characters full. They had lives before the book that flow into it and beyond it.
At this point, I’m sure I still sound pretty crazy despite my claim that I’m not, but that’s okay. I’m kind of glad I sound crazy. Sure, it probably repels others, but I never had much going on socially before anyway. I grew up never really having any realistic aspirations. Most kids say they want to be veterinarians or firefighters when they grow up, but I always wanted to be a Jedi knight or an old-time explorer. Then I started writing and I could be all the crazy outlandish things I wanted to be growing up. Sure, it has since further broken my brain, but I have a dream now. Most importantly, because I have this broken brain, I can tell a good story. I don’t claim to be some literary master who has good grammar, but I do say with confidence I can write a good story. How could I not when I have the people who lived it occupying my head?
If you’d like to check out the novel from this article that broke my brain it is available here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B015TWROHA
