WTF? Writing, Characters & Writers
I have started to write a science fiction novel, and like all science fiction, it is about people more than science. In it I have created several characters and 2 of them are for all intents and purposes, what is known as star-crossed lovers.
Here's the rub. Although they are purely fictional characters, as I wrote about their first kiss, I found myself getting jealous. WTF?
Would somebody like to explain this to me, because I certainly don't understand it? I've never heard of anybody doing/feeling something like this for figments of their own their own imagination.
Labels: Writing
posted by Charles @ 10:42 AM
Comments: 22 <-<<Add One!
22 Comments:
Charles....
I would indeed comment on that...
So is this something you have ever heard of? How common might it be?
If I know about killing off a character, will I feel guilt as I write it?
It was so strange. I knew what was to happen, yet as I wrote it I found I was feeling jealousy.
havent read the full script yet but
**I found myself getting jealous. WTF?
maybe ur missing a Kiss in ur life? It so happens with me :)
Keshi.
I'd hate to think my emotions are overriding my thoughts. My thoughts are very important to me. I value them more than what I feel. I seem to be accessing the feelings more to be able to describe them, but this wasn't the feeling I was going for.
Dear Charles
Whatever we might be at any stage of our life, It is important to remember that we are like any other normal human being having a normal capibility of feelings & emotions, & the sooner we accept that the better.
I know that feeling, & yet I am not ashamed of it. It does not create any sense of guilt in me, because I know that that is how a normal average human is supposed to feel.It is Natural, & I have no problems with being natural.
Mind is very subtle, yet you cannot deny the fact that it is a part & parcel of Human body & relatively connected.As a result, our thought do effect our body & our feelings, nothing new in that!
Do you realise, that the entire world that we see outside us today, as it is, with signs of progress and all, is all a projection of human imagination?
There is nothing wrong to feeling like that, it is just that you have attempted at an Art form for the first time in a CREATIVE manner.[ There are art forms that can be attempted technically too, but that is different, that is calculative]. To be creative, is to have feelings. To be creative, is to pour your inner being in your art, to be creative is to give birth, to be creative is a very painful process...sometimes very devastating.But it can also be contrary at times, very uflifting, very en- lightening.
You are disturbed that you feel like that about that particular scene. I am not surprised at all.
It is not about those charachters, that is just a translated 'Vision' you see, of your own need.It is your own subtle supressed feeling that has found a 'form' a release in a very powerful image of a 'kiss shared'.& jealousy arises because you ,being in constant denial, cannot attain to it.Nature pulls your strings and you pull the other way. & that is what is creating this ' difficulty' in you.
The deeper your starvation, the more possibility there is of your feeling that.
Your whole life is a long process of feeling lonely. This is a profound experience that has happened in the process of being creative, and because of that profound experience you have a glimpse of your being.
Forget the interpretation, that is where you are missing. This is really something new that is happening. It is new and so you cannot figure out what it is. The only way to know it is to go into it, to be aquainted with it to be able to set yourself free.
Everyone needs to realise his own Nature. Without that Life is not a joy, not a festivity. That 'enlightenment' is your innermost being. Just because you are so much involved in seeking, in searching, that you never reach your own self.
But our ego creates the problem. Our egotistical mind is always interested in the difficult, almost impossible task, because it gives us the challange and ego needs challange to become bigger and bigger.With our egos we convince ourselves that beiing natural is to be full of guilt. It is our ego that makes us full of all kind of 'auterities of self torture'and you make your own lifw as deep an anguish as possible. It is your ego, that makes you deny the very subjectivity of your being, it is your ego that make you try to swim upstream.The ego is never interested in the immediate, the ego is never interested in the obvious. Only in the faraway goals!
As far as the feeling of jealousy is concerned; I will take a classic example, which might illustrate just what you might be feeling.
Take the case of father and son, or mother and daughter.There is bound to be a great antgonism between father and son. the father has to dicipline the son, has to curb and cut his freedom and order him and force him to obey. and nobody wahts to obey and be given the shoulds and the should nots.The father is so powerful and the son feels jealous. And the greatest jealousy in most of the cases is that the son wants the mother to be completely his own and this father always comes in between and is always there. & not only the son feels jealous thus, the father feels like wise about his son. This natural antagonism, this natural jealousy makes the oher look like the enemy.You may want to kill your father, but your moral conscience will prevent you from doing such a thing & you will find a substitute.
That is the strategy of the ego; to find a substitute in which you translate. The ego cannot accept the fact that you are feeling jealous and murderous tyowards your father, so it allows your subconscious to kill some other authority figure in the dream instead, which seems much easier.
Next to sleep, sex or love is the greatest source of conscious egoless experience, which of course has been condemned by society and religion.For centuries we have been told that sex is the greatest sin; and such a teching has become a part of our blood bone and marrow. So even if you know consciously that there is nothing wrong in it, the sub conscious keeps you a little detached, afraid and guilt ridden, and you cannot move into it totally.
Perhaps through your fictional charachters you were having a total egoless subconscious experince of which your conscious egotistical self felt intensely jealous of.
Do you then know, that you were jealous of your own rare self at that moment & the charachters were just there to give a form to your experience.
You felt it all the more, because it was a very powerful sensual experience of communion and meeting of dynamic forces through a process that almost sucks the life out of you.
No need to kill the charachter. Just wait for the feeling to pass. It is an intergral part of creative writing that you might have such profound and at times very painful experiences.
I have known that feeling several times, & it nearly kills...
If you are starved of something too much, you start substituting it with imagination.
I was recently speaking at Dan's, Go away from the world, fall silent for a while,& you will see that even in your aloneness emotions like anger & sexuality sometime surface. This is the innermost subjectivity of your being. Nothing to do with any man or woman.It is that just someone might happen to be around then, & then suddenly that someone will start looking like the most beautiful person to you, even if he/she is the ugliest.
The very fact, that your emotions translate, not to any real, or semi real[virtual] beings but to fictional charachters proves this.
Mona,
Let me say this, there is a difference between alone and lonely.
Alone is something I do a lot of.
Lonely is something I rarely see.
Ok, that behind us, the question is still there; is this something that a lot of writers experience? How common is it to feel about your creations as you might feel about real people?
Yes indeed Charles, There is a huge difference between being lonely and alone. Aloneness is ultimate & since there is no way to be anything but alone after each profound experience you are alone & you are Full and it is totally fresh enegy that wells up in you, because you are when you are alone you are totally free from the other, & you are absolute in yourself.Loneliness on the other hans is when you miss the other, when you NEED something from outside to drown yourself into.
Ok the aside.Of course this is a very 'common rare phenomenon' It is experienced not only by writers but also by painters and sculptors.
Remember, your creation, in whatever form it is , is a part of you, contains a part of you.
Creativity has nothing to do with an activity in particular, anything can be creative, you bring that quality to that activity. It is an attitude an inner approach- how you look at things.Whatever you do, if you do it joyfully and lovingly and your act of doing it is not purely economical, then it is creative.If you have something growing out of it within you, if it gives you growth, it is spiritual it is creative, it is divine.
Life is a longing, pure longing to attain higher and higher peaks, longing to go deeper and deeper into existence. But each moment can be utterly satisfying, tht difference is to be remembered. When you are apinting, each brush stroke, each colour that you throw at the canvas, each moment of it is totally satisfying. there is nothing more to it. You are utterly lost, possessed, if you are a creator.Your work of art has to pulsate and throb with Life.
If you are a technician then it is not so. The technician is not lost while he is painting, he is seperate from his painting. He is just using his knowledge. He knows how to paint, that is all. There is nothing to create, but just the technology. He is not an artist, but a technician.
For an artist, his art has to be his love affair. The craetor is not seperate from his work while he is creating, he is one with it. He is utterly lost, he has forgotten himself.
That is why, when a painter is painting, he forgets about food, forgets about thirst, forget about sleep.One can forget about ones body so much so that one can go on painting for eighteen hours without feeling tired.Each moment is totally satisfying.But once the painting is complete, or the creative process is over a great sadness or agitation descends upon the artist. A technician on the other hans will feel very satisfied and happy with a good job done because his work is result oriented; he wants to finish it somehow, it is a great relief for him. But not so for a creative artist. He experiences, the peak, the climax and his orgasmic experience while he is into the creative act, and it brings in various shades of emotions. The act of creation itself is of tremendous value top the artist, beautiful in itself and such an experience creates another aspiration, another longing, another search, another pregnancy...
" I seem to be accessing the feeling more, to be able to describe them". That is how you feel.That is how you will feel because there is no other way to feel.A work of art can never be perfect. When you visualise it in the deepest core of your heart, it is a totally different thing. When you start translating it, from subtle to gross, in that very translation and transformation, much is lost. Hence you might feel highly emotional, deeply frustrated, when you create, because it is not the same, that you wanted to do, similar but not the same. An artist has some vision to compare of which the art has fallen very short of. Hence he has to staer again and again. Try to change his very vision, to conform to his art. Yes that is the danger when you feel that. Your logic tends to distort the process and threatens to convert you into a technician.Make you differ from the Vision in the middle, make you bring about changes and then you are left guilty, because then you know that you are not being true to your vision. You have manipulated it, you have cheated the artist in you with cold intellect.You have knbifed creativity itself
knifed it..
those who have 'seen' cannot say, that which is seen cannot be painted, cannot be reduced into words, but each one has to try, & the world starts becomeing more and more beautiful because of these efforts..so go on creating, there is no other way to know what you can do, unless you do it. You will try again and again and each effort will become better and better, more and more perfect, but never perfect.
This is something very few writers experince, but those who have experience it, for them there will be no turning back & they will experience it again and again...
True creative writing is very rare and very difficult experience, it nearly kills and there is also an inherent danger that it will totally annhilates you just like the seed totally destoys itself to give birth to new branches of a tree that will flower and spread its fragnance. The seed will have to disappear in order that new foliage, new life emerges...
I'm not afraid of it nearly killing me, I've been to the brink before. That which does not... and all that.
As far as total annihilation, maybe we'd all be better off if I ceased existence and became someone else.
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Hi, Charles. Sorry I'm coming into this late, but that's usually me -- late. I just wanted to say that yes, I do completely understand how one could be jealous of characters one has created. I find myself doing the same thing. I finally got a clue and realized it was because I was forcing some of my characters to lead lives I'd like to live myself. Because I can make them do anything I wish, they're naturally semi-young, quasi-gorgeous, and doing things I wouldn't dare do myself. Makes sense to me.:)
serena joy,
Welcome. Thanks for the input, I realized what was going on after giving it some thought. Weird isn't it? They never told us about this sort of thing happening in any class I ever took. I'm glad to know its not just me, not that it would make any difference if it were.
So what kind of material do you write? Is it the mystery/thriller genre like you read?
Stop by anytime. Leave comments, get to know some of the others here (dont bring any handgrenades, they won't work, too much room around here.)
Nobody ever told me, either, Charles. I was left out in the cold to figure out on my own that I wasn't entirely nuts.:)
Thanks for the welcome. I read more mystery/thrillers than any other genre, and am "dabbling" with writing my own. Feel free to stop by my sites as well. Oh, and I gave up on hand grenades long ago. Tasers are ever so much quieter and cleaner.
SJ,
Tasers? I can understand the reasoning for quieter, but if someone loses sphincter control, wouldn't that be worse?
Perhaps, but since I'd be fleeing the scene pretty fast, cleanup would be somebody else's problem.
I haven't either charles..you need professional help.
tc
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