Fiction authors who spend time creating and living in the worlds they write about might have less control over them than they think.
The fictional characters within those worlds could be the ones doing the writing, not their authors, according to ongoing recently published research by University psychology professor Marjorie Taylor.
Taylor and Psychology Department Head Sara Hodges published a study in 2003 showing that many fiction novelists have actual relationships with their characters that can shape the direction of their stories. Now Taylor is following up on the study by talking to more experienced authors who use recurring characters throughout multiple novels.
“I would have loved to have interviewed J.K. Rowling,” she said. Taylor said she was unable to schedule a meeting.
Taylor said this next step of the research will be more in-depth and require more preparatory work to read the authors’ novels before the interviews. She said she has interviewed six authors so far for the follow-up. Although her conclusions are still incomplete for the current study, she said different genres of literature could lead to different author-character relationships.
“For some people it’s more conflicting than others. Some people really have to wrestle their characters,” Taylor said. “Other people, it’s more like the character gives it to them.”
Authors who write plot-driven detective stories, she said, might be more likely to run into conflict with their characters over where the story should go than they would be when writing character-focused literature.
As Taylor and Hodges pointed out in their first published work, author John Fowles describes the feeling of losing control of a work within his own novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.”
“We (novelists) know a world is an organism, not a machine,” Fowles writes. “We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator.”
In the initial study, Taylor said 46 of the 50 authors interviewed experienced the phenomenon she called the illusion of independent agency.
“The illusion is that this character that is imaginary has an independent agency, that they act on their own. They have their own thoughts and actions, and you’re just trying to keep up with them,” Taylor said. “It does sound kind of crazy … but the writers, they understand that it’s part of the creative process.”
Taylor said the authors she talked to often reported having relationships with their characters, and they sometimes experienced conflict with them in dealing with the plot.
“The character will have some ideas about where the novel should go that don’t necessarily line up with where the author wants it to go,” she said. “It’s almost like there’s another kind of entity that has a mind of their own.”
Taylor said she was surprised by how often authors described their characters as separate people they could interact with. She said it also affected how they wrote the story once the characters developed their own identities.
“It starts to feel like they’re taking dictation,” Taylor said. “It starts to feel like they’re not generating what the character is saying; they’re listening. The character is talking, and they’re trying to get it down as fast as they can.”
Taylor said authors seem to become separated from their stories as a result.
“It’s just unfolding, and they’re more like a reporter than they are a generator,” she said.
In extreme cases, Taylor said some authors even encountered and spoke with their characters in their every day lives outside of writing.
Donovan Douglass, an employee at Emerald City Fine Books who also writes fiction, said he has experienced the illusion of independent agency in his own works. He said it often does not occur right away, but does after he has spent some time familiarizing himself with his characters.
“At first it’s just black and white on paper,” he said.
Douglass, who said he has been writing short stories for about seven years, said he has to identify with his characters for a story to take off.
“With any story, you have to keep in mind the perspective through which you’re writing. You have to see the story through their eyes, and write it through their eyes,” he said. “After a while, it sort of takes on a whole new life form.”
Douglass’ latest work, entitled “Cleaning Outside of Spring,” focuses on a young boy named Neal with a troubled youth. After the girl he falls for in high school dies in a hiking accident, Neal is forced to cope with his own solitude, Douglass said.
Douglass said he spent about two months working on the story, and Neal took on his own identity fairly early on in the writing process. He said the same thing happens to him with nearly every story he writes.
“It’s surprising every time,” he said.
Taylor also wrote fiction in the form of a screenplay to better understand the phenomenon she is studying. She said she experienced the same thing as her subjects at times.
“There were definitely times when I would just sit down at the computer and start thinking about the world of the screenplay, and then just write it down,” she said. “It was just happening.”
Taylor said she will try to interview about 20 more experienced authors for her follow-up research, including one scheduled for later this fall.