January 16th, 2020

Based on real life

I rarely create a character by simply attempting to describe a person I know in real life and have them act on the page. Sometimes I will take single facts or idiosyncrasies about real individuals and collage them onto a largely imaginary character that I’ve created, but rarely just a whole person transposed from the world into a book. In fact, you could say I’ve never done it, because the only people I’ve attempted to import to fiction as themselves are people I barely know and find bizarre or incomprehensible in real life, so I write them to supply them with the motivations and inner life in fiction that I’ve been so longing to know in reality. It’s almost impossible anyone I’ve ever done this with would recognize themselves in the stories, which is why I feel comfortable with it–and yet satisfied that I’ve told myself (and others) a story that makes enough sense so I can stop worrying about the real people that inspired it, though my stories undoubtedly have nothing to with them.

This is all a long way of saying I ran into one such person yesterday, waiting for an elevator. This has actually never happened before! I took me a minute to realize why I was having such a visceral reaction to a fellow chilly, early-morning soul in the grey foyer–and then I remembered. She didn’t seem to recognize me, which is an advantage of years and reconstructive jaw surgery, but as I say, we never knew each other much to start with. But she was uncomfortable with something, whether it was the vague sense she knew me from somewhere or that I was hiding my interest in her face–the lines on her face, which weren’t there before–less well than I meant to.

Almost definitely the latter. She hadn’t gone on in the life I imagined for the character, I could tell by her sweater–disappointing but a natural consequence of fiction. After we got off the elevator, we waited in the same line for a moment, and then she sped off and I’m sure was glad to leave me and my greedy curiosity behind. I could google–everyone’s google-able, and I actually have done this for her in the past–or if I worked hard enough I could maybe think of a mutual friend somewhere and try to work her name into the conversation, see what comes up.

I don’t think I’ll do those things–the temptation is there, but what purpose would it serve? The character got a spark from the person once, but at this point the two flames burn entirely separately.

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