Drinking With My Characters

Baudelaire, C. (?). Be drunk. Available: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/be-drunk

My characters motivate me to write. I meet them in my mind over coffee in the cafeteria I remember from my college days -- butterscotch and white walls and pale green formica tables. Or over pints in a tavern with dark wood scarred with the names of years of customers. Or in a gazebo under glowering clouds as the wind picks up.

They tell me stories: "Did I mention the time when I spent three hundred years looking for the famed Shaolin Temple in China? I could not find it no matter how I tried, so I gave up trying and settled in a monastery in the South of China for some eighty years. Much later, I discovered that I had found the Shaolin Temple in that most unprepossessing of places."

Or "Su approached me one evening because I had apprenticed myself to her, given that I had just been engendered and she was the oldest and wisest of the Archetypes, having been engendered to serve the pre-human Denisovans. We transported to a strange place -- a cave in the middle of InterSpace, with stars where there was no sky. She whispered to me, 'I need your help -- our compatriots hatch a plot that would hold the humans in subjugation ...'  It was at that moment that I knew I would surrender my life to assist her, whatever that meant to a near-immortal species..."

Or "If you ask me about the story of my life, at this late point, I will start by pointing out that it doesn't have a plot. I have been a Jewish girl who became a convinced Quaker in college, a pacifist who nonetheless knows how much damage can be done with a picket sign, a liberated woman who chose as a lover an abuser, and who walked out of that relationship -- literally -- with my infant son. I have organized protests, shouted down political figures, and founded an ecocollective, which I think I will be most remembered for. But I have never been in love."

My characters develop and interact with each other. They walk into stories, which weave around each other. My characters are not me, but the creations of my imagination. When the stories are written, my characters occasionally wander back to have a drink with me.