By Yvonne Osborne

You can’t blame a writer
for what the characters say.
– Truman Capote

How important is the relationship between a writer and their character? What is the Zone? If you’re a writer, have you been there? If you’re a reader, have you? They are first-cousin related. Let’s go!

When a writer’s fingers fly across the keyboard to keep up with their racing thoughts, and they don’t know where the story’s going only that the writing is exhilarating, they’re in The Zone. Spelling and punctuation are irrelevant (insidious AI mistakes and assumptions can be cleaned up later), and it doesn’t matter if it makes sense. Sense has no place in the zone. Sense comes later in editing stages, along with punctuation and sentence structure. The zone is a writer’s paradise, free of such impediments as punctuation, sensibility, and sentence structure. All that matters is the Rule of Three—getting their character of a tree, throwing stones at him, and getting him down. and as Saul Bellow said—”you never have to change the guts of anything you get up in the middle of the night to write.”

Like a writer in the zone, a reader lost in a book is transported to another world. From the comfort of an armchair or cozied up in bed with a light, they travel to a different time, dropped head-first into another culture and circumstance, thick as thieves or beleaguered as migrants, they climb the tree in a shared pursuit.

I learned from authors Chris Whitaker and Sally Roony that one of the cardinal rules of grammar—the sentence fragment no-no—is not so cardinal after all. But as with all writing rules, you can only ignore them if first you know them. As a relatively new author, I still use sentence fragments with caution, the old guilt instilled by my ninth grade English teacher, Mrs. Wood, with her obsession for diagraming sentences, has the staying power of other rules instilled by the grammarians of our upbringing. But as some authors have shown, the sentence fragment can be a useful device in a writer’s toolbox to indicate acceleration and immediacy of events, if not overplayed.

What does matter in this early stage is character. Are they believable, three-dimensional, and interesting? Do you love them and all their foibles? If we writers love our characters but allow them to do stupid shit, then there’s a good chance our reader will care about them too.

The relationship writers have with their characters is a real relationship. That is, it has elements of actual love in it. Some may think that because a character isn’t real, the emotions can’t be either. But they can. It’s not like parent/child love, or romantic love, or human/dog love, nothing like that. It’s its own thing. It’s writer/character love, and while one-way only, it is real, and it is powerful. To have that kind of loving relationship on tap is a gift writers have.

When immersed in writing a novel in deep third person point of view, I feel closer to my characters than the real people in my life. I think about them all the time. I take them to bed with me and into the shower with me. I drive fearlessly down strange, darkened inner-city streets because that’s where my character lives.

One night, when driving through the city of Detroit, I came upon a detour that took me off the main highway onto the surface streets of the inner city. Normally this would have alarmed me, but when I realized this was my character’s neighborhood, I relaxed. I knew where I was. This was his street, his corner store, his favorite hang-out. It was safe and familiar because I had transcended from writing in the zone to living it. The writing had infused me with the gift of courage.

It’s difficult to explain, but I wanted to show how writers can and do fall in love with their characters, which enables the reader to care about them too. Character love is real and intrinsic, developed and strengthened while writing in the zone. Up a tree together, we are fearless.

• Author Interviews
• Blog
• Wild About Publishing