Clarification of Yesterday’s Post, with a Quote from Toni Morrison

When Dickens and Faulkner said that they got most of what they wrote from their characters, you might have thought, “Well, so what? All you are saying is that they imagined that their characters told them these things.”

Well, yes, they did imagine it, but not in the usual sense of imagining. For example, suppose I wanted to decide what to have for lunch. I would imagine various foods and decide which I preferred. In doing that, I would have the subjective sense that “I” was in charge of the process and that “I” was doing the imagining.

But that is not what Dickens and Faulkner said happened in their writing process. Their subjective experience was not that they imagined most of what they wrote, but that the characters did. They experienced the characters as being independent, thinking beings with minds of their own (which is the essence of multiple personality).

Novelists experience their characters as real. How real? As Toni Morrison said (see post of October 26, 2013), “much more real than real people.”