Who wrote your favourite book? You probably think that’s a pretty easy question to answer, but some research I conducted this week suggests you might actually be wrong. I’m not talking about ghost writers or anything along those lines, I‘m simply suggesting that perhaps rather than being written by J.K.Rowling, the "Harry Potter" series was actually written by none other than Harry, Ron and Hermione themselves. Some of you are probably considering calling the men in white coats right about now; how can a fictional character who doesn’t even really exist have written their own book? Just bear with me.
I got to thinking about this subject earlier this week after reading a post on one of the many blogs I follow. Called “Musings of an X-Phile”, the blog posts up reviews of "X-Files" episodes written by a fan called Salome who is currently re-watching her way through the entire series. This week was the review of episode 6x18 - “Milagro”, in which an author is writing a book about a murderer. The author, Phillip Padgett, creates his character so perfectly that he truly comes to life and the murders in the book actually begin to happen. That’s a rather simplified explanation but it will do. Rather than simply reviewing the episode, the post went on to discuss about how fictional characters are in fact real, I’ll let Salome explain:
It’s an interesting concept. What makes a person real? The whole concept of the Milagro episode of The X-Files was essentially Chris Carter and the other show writers admitting that they had in a sense lost control of the very characters they had created. Many years before Milagro aired, Carter had sworn that Mulder and Scully would never become a romantic pair, yet they did. Was that because the writers caved to fan pressure or was it in fact because the characters had evolved away from the writers, that they had become so real that they were now dictating the stories of their own lives to the people who created them?
I am also a fiction writer and the idea resonated with me. Although at this point I mostly write fanfiction, I have still created my own characters and already experienced the sensation of them and other "borrowed" characters taking over the stories. I frequently reach the end of a chapter and realise that the content I just finished writing bears little resemblance to the outline I had begun with. Yes the bare bones are still there but my characters have taken the opportunity to tell their own stories. In one story I am halfway through writing, a chapter that was supposed to be a simple car ride was hijacked by a minor character and became his background story. Another time a character I had briefly mentioned several chapters back with no intention of revisiting (someone’s secretary if you must know) effectively walked into my head and announced that she was coming back in this chapter because she was in fact a far more vital character than I had written her so far thank you very much. I wondered if other authors had experienced this sensation or if I was just going insane. After all I (like most Harry Potter fans) have heard J.K.Rowling’s anecdote about how Harry himself "just strolled into my head fully formed” while she was riding a train back in 1990 - what if this was the same experience? Perhaps this is a form of collective insanity shared by those of us who choose to put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard? Folie á deux with millions of participants.
I posted the question late one night on Google Plus to my writers circle and had to switch my phone off when I went to bed to stop the incessant buzzing as writer after writer, including many of my fellow GeekMoms, responded. Here’s what some of them had to say:
So definitely not just me then!
All this research has made me both happy and relieved. See I’ve been of the belief that fictional characters can truly exist for quite some time now, simply because they exist within us. After all, these are people we spend huge amounts of our time with over the years, we learn from them and sometimes we turn to them when we need comfort. The X-Files has been a part of my life for longer than I’ve known my best friend or my husband. How can characters I’ve identified with and looked up to since the age of eight not be “real” to me; and after hearing from so many authors it seems that the characters are just as real (if not more so) to their creators than to us as readers and viewers. My favourite line from all the comments I received on Google Plus this week was from one of the excerpts above from Roxanne Smolen about how she was mostly “taking dictation” from characters that already existed in her mind as they told her their story.
So now I ask you to think about your favourite book and ask yourself again, although you might know the name of the human being who put their fingers to a pen or a keyboard, who actually wrote it?
