Got virus?

Why, yes. Yes I do.

In addition to a wardrobe, a six-drawer dresser, the writing desk (yay!) on which my laptop rests and the chair on which my ass sits, I also brought back some sort of nameless affliction from Ikea that required no assembly at all. Sunday was supposed to be a day of character sketches, but I spent most of the it prone on the bed in a Benadryl haze with a sweating fever of 100 degrees while the heat outside sank through the roof tiles and into the room.

I did manage to write a little, capping off the chapter where I stopped writing back in December. It took four sentences. Now, instead of entering the hedonistic circus of a converted Manhattan cathedral, our protagonist will head of to the Ramble for a bit of fun in the woods. He's overdressed for it, but what the hell.

Trouble is...that's what he's doing. Because I have not spelled out his essential nature for myself, the why of it isn't as deep as it needs to be. It's those extra depths of why that turn the tale.

But: the chapter is done. I often find that if I'm hung up on writing a scene when I know its general content, it's generally because the character doesn't want to go where I'm telling him to go, for reasons of his own. So I'll let this guy wander into Central Park and see what happens.

I used to think that sort of thing was a bunch of New Agey hippy-style bullshit. I misinterpreted the idea that characters would "wander off" on their own as a sort of spiritualist automatic writing, with the author watching as his fingers wrote or typed of their own accord. It took me long time to figure out that writers who spoke of that were were describing an attitude and a practice, rather than an objective reality.

It's roughly akin to what I learned about LSD from both experience and from Stephen Gaskin's Haight Ashbury Flashbacks (now called Amazing Dope Tales). It's not that the guy sitting next to you on the couch has actually turned into a giant green lizard, it's just that you've altered your perception enough so that it doesn't matter whether he's a lizard or not, and it's much more interesting if he is, so why not just see that.

Similarly, nobody's saying that your characters are supposed to become little individuals running around in your noggin doing their own thing as objective schizoid beings. But if you've spent enough time with your characters as ideas which represent actual people, and if you've delved deeply enough into the essential nature of those ideas, then eventually you'll reach a point where those ideas, those characters, will come into conflict with what you would do in the situation you've created for them.  There is no finer moment than when you realize that one of your main characters is kind of an asshole after they've gone and done something that you would never do, or that he's a better person than you are, for the same reason. It's much more interesting to explore what your characters do than what you would do. Nobody cares about that.

Yes, I recognize the irony of using LSD hallucinations to explain that something is not New Agey hippy-style bullshit. Back off.

Anyway. I've stayed home from work today to recover. I think I'm feeling better, but that might have something to do with pounding shots of generic Nyquil all night and switching over to faux Dayquil once the sun slitted through the blinds. I'm coherent enough to write, which I'll do in a little while.

Tune in for tomorrow's TED video; it's a good one. All about words and the dictionaries we put them in.

Plus, Erin McKean is hot.