Mark Twain Says That Characters Write Themselves (Just Like The Alternate Personalities in Multiple Personality)

In “Mark Twain Tells the Secrets of Novelists” (New York American, 26 May 1907), elaborating on what was quoted in the December 23, 2013 post, Twain said:

“Authors rarely write books. They conceive them, but the books write themselves. This is practically true of all characteristics intended to be portrayed…

“I never deliberately sat down and ‘created’ a character in my life. I begin to write incidents out of real life. One of the persons I write about begins to talk [in] this way and [another] one [talks in] another [way], and pretty soon I find that these creatures of the imagination have developed into characters, and have for me a distinct personality. These are not ‘made.’ They just grow naturally out of the subject. That was the way Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and other characters came to exist. I couldn’t to save my life deliberately sit down and plan out a character according to a diagram. In fact, every book I ever wrote just wrote itself. I am really too lazy to sit down and plan and fret to ‘create’ a ‘character.’ If anybody wants any character ‘creating,’ they will have to go somewhere else for it.”

As noted in my post of August 21, 2013, “Where I’m Coming From,” this is the kind of thing, in interviews of recent novelists, that led me to research Dickens and start this blog.

What Twain and other novelists describe about how they get their characters is basically the same way that people with multiple personality get their alternate personalities: They do not deliberately and methodically create them. But out of some pressing need, and based on a known or imagined kind of person, the seemingly autonomous personalities, like Twain’s seemingly autonomous characters, magically materialize.

When Twain and other novelists tell us about this in interviews, hardly anyone really listens, including the interviewers. Of the many interviews that I have read and seen in which novelists confided such things, I have never known any interviewer to seriously pursue it.