Writers are definitely crazy.

That phrase popped into my head many years ago during a brief lull while I was typing out my first novel. I uttered the words a few times trying to decide why they had come to me.

It was a warm morning in July and I was stuck partway through a subchapter and it didn’t seem that I would get unstuck anytime soon.

More as a distraction than anything else, I toyed with the phrase to see where it might lead.

Writers are definitely crazy. Being a writer, was I suspect as well?

Maybe I should consider this notion in an abstract classical psychology context.

I’ve always had a swirling, ever-changing and very detailed alternate universe buzzing around in my head; the National Institute of Health calls that sort of thing delusional with a dash of hallucinations for good measure: a strange sounding recipe that means wacko.

Mmm; this wasn’t looking good.

I thought about the tricks that I’ve used when I write dialog.

“Hello Mr. Smith, how are you today?” wondered the little girl.

“I’m just fine Becky. Thank you for asking,” replied the old man.

To knock those two lines out, I briefly become a well-attired four year old lass bedecked in a lovely white Sunday dress and then a dapper but approachable seventy-eight year old gent.

How would they sound?

I could hear their particular voices; the old man’s is warm and throaty but not quite hoarse, perhaps the result of smoking a pipe for many years; the little girl chirps in high clear tones like a sparrow might early on a spring morning.

Occasionally several people will chatter away in my head like quarrelsome chipmunks offering opinions and suggestions while I write, especially if I’m working on a frightening disaster or maybe a vexing murder.

“Intermittently becoming someone else is often referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder,” reminds the National Institute of Health.

“Auditory hallucinations can be a major component of schizophrenia,” chimes in Wikipedia.

Yikes! It seems that I’m well on my way to Bedlam.

Long ago in the 1970’s when I went to college, a wave of experimentalism left over from the previous decade was sweeping though the curriculum.

I took a composition class in the English Department called Short Story Writing. As a way to produce believable characters in our novice attempts at fiction, the instructor encouraged us to role-play different parts.

We would slide all of the classroom furniture to the side and huddle together on the floor while she called out progressively more difficult personas.

“Old women!” she’d shout and twenty-three reluctant students would hobble around like their grandmothers.

“Babies!” We rolled around on the floor crying and generally complaining about diaper rash.

“Cats!” The more adventurous staked invisible birds and mice while the more timid merely cleaned themselves or stared vacantly into space.

“Cabbage!” Nearly everyone stood in consternation while a few imaginative drama students slowly popped out of the fertile brown earth and produced wide green leaves under the warm California sun.

Later we would write a few paragraphs about what it was like to truly be an elderly woman or a hungry feline or a garden vegetable.

Nearly everyone who wrote well in that class reported that they saw the world for a time as a helpless newborn or a sharply focused tabby.

To craft good characters, you must become your characters: actually hearing their voices and feeling their aches and pains. To successfully convey the fantastic lands that have never existed, you must first dwell there for a time: climbing the mountains on the moon or swimming through clouds that shroud distant worlds. To write fiction, you must be able to imagine.

Perhaps I am crazy after all...