A majority of my characters don’t start as made up or imagined. They aren’t even mine, since they’re based to a greater or lesser degree on irl notebook captures. Scenes (ie, the behaviours of characters), are more or less reported, more or less nonfictional, according to the type of fiction they’re part of. There are short stories which are pure autofiction except for an ambience given almost entirely by the delivery, or by a single, brief, carefully placed incident. Characterisation is an accumulation of scenes, as in life; it is revelatory, but only in the sense that what you’ve seen is all you’ll get. There’s no such thing as “out of character” behaviour. We only ever know the behaviour. Character “development” is equally cumulative. Characters never speak to me, literally or figuratively. I don’t “see” them, literally or figuratively, although I sometimes “see” a landscape or a room, with figures nearer or further away; or “remember” in close-up a physical event, such as being a passenger in a car or a customer in a shop. Relations with a character are carried out via the management of groups of words, sentences & paragraphs, and the general, long-term working through of the structures that emerge. The characters & most scenes may be real: the fiction they produce is exactly that, fiction. While I have a history of generalised childhood dissociation & alienation, I never had imaginary friends or hallucinated voices. I write ghosts & imaginary countries: but not “about” them. I don’t experience them or believe in them, even temporarily. They don’t charm me in that sense. They make metaphors. They’re vehicular & I want the reader to look for their subtextual passengers & payloads. While I don’t relate to a written character as real (any more than I make much of a distinction between the methods of fiction & nonfiction) that doesn’t mean I view them as unreal either. An opposition like that seems to me to be standardising, unsubtle & not descriptive of the relationships it’s hoping to describe. I don’t think an imagist is ever in favour of codified knowledge of people, things, structures or systems. An imagist looks for the fractures and fragments, the tacit meaning that lies in the fractures between the fragments. I would regret it if I thought that by making this note I had helped codify any of these relationships or produce any kind of standardising view of what is–even in the most mimetic of fiction–a fully intuitive, highly individual process, motivated by highly individual needs & purposes.

[& for more, see this podcast interview by Richard Lea.]