Conversations with Myself

I have a question for the writers out there: Have you ever found yourself talking with one of your characters out loud?

You see, right now I have a character living in my head, and she likes to talk. Her name is Kella.

To an outsider, I'm sure they think I'm insane when they see me bob my head and talk to the nonexistent person in the passenger seat of my car. I don't get a lot of alone time, but the five minutes during my daily commute without kids in the backseat is my time...well my time and Kella's.

We talk about almost every subject under the sun, but mostly, we talk about her dreams for the future, and the problems Kella is having with her love interest.

This technique works well for me when I'm building plot and characters. In fact, I tell my writing students to use this as needed, because they can work out ideas in a short amount of time.

There does tend to be a problem with this approach, though. As I process dynamic characters, their motivations have a tendency to change, which forces me to adjust the endgame I had planned.

Case in point, I was around 57K words into a new-age romantic story where Kella was the main character, and I realized her voice had changed. She didn't have the same motivations in the late rising action as she did in the exposition, and that was a problem. So, I scraped the majority of the story and began rewriting and re-plotting.

I thought revisions might feel like a dauntless task; instead, it was freeing. These characters and their stories are important to me, and it's my job to tell it right.

Kella isn't the first character to live in my head, and the characters do change from time to time, depending on the season, my stress level, and what I'm writing at the moment.

When life gets too busy and I can't find time to write, those five minutes in the car with Kella make me feel connected to my characters, and my true life's passion.