An Issue for Married Novelists: Your spouse, knowingly or unknowingly, may have relationships with your characters, narrators, or other alternate personalities.

Novelists are often impressed by the fact that their characters, narrators, etc., know things that their regular self or writer self had not known. And it is not just that they seem to have minds of their own, but that they seem to have lives of their own.

The novelist may assume that these others’ lives exist only inside, in the dream world, so to speak. And for the most part, that’s true. But mightn’t they sometimes come out into the regular world, too?

You don’t think so? How would you know? You admit that they sometimes know things you don’t. And does your spouse sometimes act like things have been going on that you don’t recall?