Writers’ Imaginary Friends

“Writers aren’t exactly people … they’re a whole lot of people trying to become one person.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”- E.L. Doctorow

I read an article last year with the results of a research study that found a majority of authors can hear their characters speaking to them.

My first reaction was how is this news? Of course we can. But then I got to thinking how odd that sounds to non-writers. I’ll never forget the alarm on my husband’s face the first time I told him that a character told me something. Since then, he’s overheard me listening to many author interviews where they say the same thing. “At least you’re all crazy,” he once said.

Are we?

I had an imaginary friend growing up. His name was Gobo and he was my favorite fraggle from the popular ‘80s show Fraggle Rock.

I’ve posted before how I can’t conjure faces out of nothing for my characters, so I always picture them as actors. Apparently, this was the same problem I had as a child electing to use an already created being as an imaginary friend.🤷‍♀️

I always realized Gobo wasn’t really there, not in the way my real friends or cousins were, but I felt like he was real. I had conversations with him. I occasionally used him to attempt to get what I wanted. “Gobo doesn’t want me to clean my room,” I once told my Mom. She later wised up and would say, “Gobo told me to tell you to clean your room.” My response? “Gobo lies.”

The phenomenon of childhood imaginary friends is proof that humans are capable of having relationships with people or beings that don’t actually exist. Children who have imaginary friends often applauded for their creativity, but of course, it becomes a bit problematic if you are an adult with one.

Adults, however, are quite capable of forming emotional bonds with “imaginary” people, aka characters in books and movies. Yes, we know they aren’t real, but we still shed tears over them, get angry at them, root for them, etc. This, to me, is one of the most interesting aspects of humanity. We can know someone isn’t real, yet still bond emotionally with them.

Authors also know these characters we write aren’t real, but as I could with my imaginary friend, we do often believe we are hearing them.

Character development is mostly my focus as a writer. I’m not the best descriptive writer, I don’t include meticulous research and details, some plot holes may slip through, but my most frequent compliment in reviews is that my characters feel real. Maybe that’s because in my mind, they do become real.

Yes, I realize I’m creating this character. I’m choosing everything about them from their hair color to their greatest fear. But sometimes after creating one, I hear a voice telling me I got it all wrong.

Take Lorraine in Enemies of Doves. She was only supposed to play a very small role in the story. I needed Clancy in prison, and I wasn’t sure why he would be there yet. I decided maybe it would have to do with a woman he loved, maybe he was protecting her etc. I thought that may add a bit of a romantic element to a story that was only going to be about the relationship between two brothers. And who doesn’t like a little romance in a story?

Here are my original notes about Lorraine.

If you’ve read my book, you know that is NOT Lorraine. How/why did she change? The only way I know to describe it is that she told me I was all wrong about her.

One day early on when I was writing, I felt like Lorraine was telling me she was actually not quiet or soft spoken at all but loud and opinionated. That she cared deeply about social issues. She drew hard stances on politics and had lots of ideas on how to improve the country, but struggled making decisions in her own personal life.

That was intriguing to me because I think we all know people who have opinions about how everything in the world should be, but their own lives are such a mess, we’d never want to put them in charge of anything else.

As I was changing my outline to include these aspects, she also whispered that she actually wasn’t tall or all that beautiful, that her hair was blonde, and that her parents actually had no problem with her dating Clancy even though he didn’t have money.

I liked the new Lorraine so much I changed much of the plot to involve her more. I didn’t plan on making her a point of view character until I wrote the scene where she and Clancy met at the gas station through Clancy’s point of view. I clearly heard a line in my head. Lorraine saying Clancy was so obviously flirting with her and in such a silly looking hat. I loved that line and knew I needed to rewrite the scene in her point of view, and it was so much better the second time around. It’s still one of my favorite chapters in the entire book and one of the very few that neither of my editors touched. I then went and searched my outlines for other scenes where she could be the point of view character.

A lot of people don’t like Lorraine and I get it, she’s pretty wishy-washy and causes a lot of problems for the Fitchett brothers, but she’s my favorite character. I really think that’s because she’s the one who most came alive to me as I wrote. She’s the one who surprised me, and we writers love to be surprised.

With A River of Crows, one character who was supposed to be a main one, Felicity, sort of fizzled out and became really minor. She was just pretty uninteresting to me.

Meanwhile another character, Dylan, stepped out of the shadows. In my original outline he’s in one scene, in the final draft he’s a main character.

According to Celeste Kidd, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, imaginary friends are a symptom of a child developing social intelligence. Around the age of 4 and 5 children begin to understand that people possess different beliefs, desires, and exhibit different behaviors than themselves. This is called theory of mind. Studies show that children who have imaginary friends often have advanced theory of mind. In other words, they have a greater understanding of diversity, which is pretty cool when you think about it. It’s also been found that children with imaginary companions are better storytellers, telling stories with more narrative richness.

This social intelligence, the realization that people are different than we are, also lends to creating great fictional characters in my opinion. Sure, sometimes authors base characters on ourselves (I did with Garrison), but we have to use our imagination (and experiences) to also create people very different than we are. Because like 4- and 5-year-olds realize, the world is better with diversity in it.

I can’t read a book where the main characters are flat and there are a few genres I avoid for that reason —because the characters are usually not realistic and well-rounded. My characters don’t always react like I would, or say what I would say. They don’t all share my same morals or life experiences, and thank goodness they don’t or my stories would be incredibly boring.

I LOVE the movie Split, but trust me, that’s not the kind of disorder that’s going on here. It’s not like Shanessa goes “out of the light” and then Clancy takes over and I have no idea what’s going on. When people have complaints about the content of the book, I can’t say “Crawl made me do it.” Although wouldn’t that be nice when I get messages from unhappy readers.

The only critical/complaining messages that were personally sent to me were by a few Christians who were disappointed about various aspects of Enemies of Doves. (I always do find that interesting when I think about some of the incredibly dark stories and people in the Bible, or the erotic love poem in it, but to each their own.) I’m responsible for all I write and I get the final say. I could have kept Lorraine how I planned for her to be. I could make everyone always make good and moral decisions, but my stories would suffer for it. So, I don’t scrub my characters clean with soap, I give them some grit and I let them screw everything up frequently. I let them become real, and let’s face it, real people are messy as hell…or heck, I mean.🙊

I mentioned earlier about how children with imaginary friends often tell more narratively rich stories and are more creative. Does that continue into adulthood? According to a 2010 study, maybe so. It found that children with imaginary friends grow up to score higher in the Gough Creative Personality Scale. But whether writers had these types of companions as children or not, one thing is certain, we all live among many imaginary friends now. And I’ll let you in on a secret, it’s really fun.