Stephen King and Toni Morrison Talk With Their Characters, and You Could, Too

In previous posts, King, Morrison, and Dickens have been quoted as saying that they, like most novelists, converse with their characters. So the question arises as to whether you or I, if we were interviewing a novelist, could talk with their characters. After all, if the novelist can speak with them, why couldn’t we?

How would we do it? While facing the novelist, we would address, by name, a specific character. How would it answer? Either it would speak to the novelist, and the novelist would tell us what the character was saying. Or the character would come out (temporarily taking control of the novelist’s body) and speak to us directly. At the end of the conversation, the character would go back inside and the novelist come back out.

How would we know that this was real and not just pretending? Well, I suppose that in this day and age it might be possible to use brain imaging to distinguish the novelist’s ordinary mental state from that of the character’s. But for practical purposes, the only way to distinguish the novelist’s pretending from the character’s really speaking for itself would be to ask the novelist. If the novelist honestly experienced it as happening, then we would accept it as real.

There are three possible reasons for our not being able to speak to a character. First, the novelist might resist, since the relationship with their character is a private affair, and they don’t want us to think they’re crazy. Second, the character might resist, since they don’t know us. Or, since their novel is finished, they might not be immediately available. Third, maybe novelists don’t really experience their characters as having minds of their own (but, the fact is, they keep telling us that they do).