A friend once said a good reason for writing fiction is that, as you work on your characters, you work on yourself. (He may have implied that this was the only good reason for writing fiction, but I can’t remember.) It’s kind of like therapy. Let’s say you’re a writer who struggles with social anxiety. What you do is create characters who are outgoing and gregarious, who surround themselves with interesting people, who love a party and dive into the crowd like pigs into mud. Maybe not like pigs into mud, but you get the idea. You work your characters with empathy. You project yourself into their lives. In time, without even being aware of it, the work you do on your characters is work you do on yourself. You begin to speak like them. You begin to engage with people they way they do. Before you know it, your social anxiety is an awkward memory and you’re an interesting and exciting person.
Ignoring for the time being Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, if the theory is true, if I become what I write, what happens when I choose to write characters who don’t quite live up to the social mores of my peers and my environment? After only three days of participating in NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month — it’s a question that has leapt to the fore. Through an organic process I barely understand, my character has begun to display a distinctive view of the world that leads me to a troubling conclusion: I am writing a redneck. If I follow this path, does it mean that, by the end of November, I too will be a redneck?
Here’s the situation: my main character is an organic farmer whose wife is killed in a farming accident. With an inclination to all things natural, he feels queasy about the process of a traditional embalming, so he wraps his love in a shroud and buries her under a tree on the farm. He’s a bit anti-government, a bit survivalist, and along the way he kills a buck without a hunting permit. But I’m a city boy and I know absolutely zip about deer hunting except what I’ve learned from Robert De Niro. So a bit of research is in order. Yesterday it was embalming. Today it’s field dressing and skinning a deer. Turns out rednecks just love to post videos of themselves doing real man stuff like pulling the guts out of animals they’ve just killed. So research is easy:
Of course, once you’ve field dressed a deer, you’ve got to take it back to wherever you keep your beer fridge so you can skin the thing.
Presumably you butcher it too, but I’m not writing that part, so I’d rather not know what it looks like. Who knows. Maybe by the end of the month I’ll have an uncontrollable urge to run out and buy and ATV and a Winchester rifle. Maybe the antidote is to introduce another character, a sensitive poet who farts in verse, someone who offsets the redneck factor.