Sometimes when I read, the characters can’t be called characters, because they are not characters. They are people, people with thoughts and feelings beyond the pages. And if these people are not given a body, they must inhabit something. So they inhabit me.
Inside me, they breathe hard, and I forget to. Until I close the book, suffocating them, the only thing that moves in me is my heart, trying to beat fast enough for all of us. Only then do I realize that I have stopped breathing. I let go. I want nothing more but to give breath to the people who gasp for air within closed pages. Writers give birth to them, the pages then give them a home and it’s up to me to let them breathe. To just open a book, to think about it, to absorb it and to let it live, as it should, long beyond the pages.
Sometimes after I read, I hear a voice that tells me things that were never in the text to begin with. A voice screams, “UNFINISHED!” It forces me to realize the sad truth that great art is never completed, only abandoned. There are no masterpieces — only works in progress or on hiatus. Who said “The End” ever meant anything? If the whole thing was fiction, what makes those two words any different? As said in Kevin Brooks’ book, Lucas (and I’m paraphrasing), there are no endings, only new beginnings.
Practice makes perfect — and then what? Stop practicing? You write a book about someone’s engagement — and then what? Do they stop living at your fabricated happy ending or at the wedding? Maybe not in yours, but in my world, characters, or rather, people — live long beyond the pages they call home. A happy marraige, a divorce.. life goes on.
Sometimes when I write, I think about just how easy it is to tell someone a lie, to make up a person and get away with it. When you tell someone you went out with that imaginary girlfriend (don’t get any ideas), her image — her actual self — materializes in that person’s mind. You tell them she has blonde hair — and she has blonde hair. You tell them she wants you — and she has bad taste. Those things become true in their mind. We’ve all got our perspectives, and now, from one in many, this Suzy-Lynn or whatever you choose to call her, is real. She has a brain. She has a heart and a soul. She is a person and she lives long beyond your lie.
Sometimes when I watch a movie, I can’t get past the familiar face. How can I honestly take Courtney Cox seriously in a dramatic role when I just see her as Monica Gellar? Those characters live beyond the reel until they appear on the red carpet and suddenly aren’t the detective, the casino owner or the homeless person in the film. As the magic of the movie fades with the cleanliness of the blood-red carpet: a status symbol for the shallow and the rich, the few and the undeserving many, we are sucked into their eyes and forget about the characters who suffocate inside closed books.
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