Susan Sontag: Finds her fictional characters when she hears their voices; Has two personalities, one who writes and another who speaks to friends

Q: Could you talk a little bit about creating a character? About how the characters in your stories come into being?

Sontag: …I hear a sentence in my head, and then wonder, “Who’s saying this?”…It’s always a voice…The other day I heard a sentence, which I wrote down, and I know it’s the beginning of a story. (1, p. 226).

“Every time I say ‘I,’ I feel it’s a fiction. Of course the ‘I’ has some connection with me—I don’t want to present a schizophrenic [she means multiple personality] account of what I do. But the I that can say ‘I’ in print is not the same I that speaks to my friends, that leads a life” (1, p. 198).

Other fiction writers have said the same thing.

1. Susan Sontag. Conversations with Susan Sontag. Edited by Leland Poague. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1995.