Undressing My Avatar

One of the biggest challenges and ultimately the greatest satisfaction in writing a story lies in the creation of those characters who inhabit my pages of fiction. It’s the result of trying to grasp those elusive memories of those people, places and events that made a significant impression on me. Encapsulating enough of a memory bubble to help me recreate an avatar or a place in my new fictional setting.

Sometimes the images jump out at me, easily defining themselves as perfect caricatures for the persona I’m trying to create. Other times they’re a combination of several individuals I’ve met or known in my past. It could also be a personality, character or figure from something I read or saw or felt ions ago.

Yet there is always one major obstacle in creating an avatar. The challenge of separating my reality of who I thought they were from the reality of who really were. It’s like playing checkers inside my head, jumping from real to fictional, imagination to reality. The length of years since I’ve seen that person only adds to the challenge of searching through the fog of time to gleam their true identity.

I’m trying to unlock the layers of my memory bank and figure out who they were back then and the role they played in my life. I am trying to undress them, to reveal their soul to my readers.

But since mindset often colors experience, thoughts about that person tend to be less than completely accurate. Usually they are reactions or prejudices based on limited knowledge or smeared into distortion by the passage of time and age and past conditioning.

I don’t know how to divorce my past lives, relationships, experiences, prejudices, incidents, failures and successes from my story telling. That certainly is true when it comes to creating female characters.

The female protagonist, with all of their complexities, is always harder to create than her male counterpart. Who am I really thinking of when I create a female character? My avatars aren’t always women I have known. They could be a movie character or stage persona that struck me with her unique characteristics.

Unfortunately, it’s never a straight forward procedure but rather a rather subliminal process each time I want to create a new female character. I wish it were as easy as: “I knew that person…that person would suit my character… I will imagine that avatar in my character’s role.”

At times, it might be a compilation of several people that I’ve known or met in my past even if I can’t identify with whom and or when or what exactly happened back then. But something did happen that scratched a memory scar on my brain that only now, through the creative process, is being uncovered and its multiple layers peeled away.

It could be someone I never really knew that well but left a strong impression on me nevertheless. Like the dark-haired woman sipping her demitasse in Montmartre. She looked right through me with distain and disregard. Snow White, in her tight turtle neck sweater, pondering her new life in Belgium. Maria from Denmark yearning for her homeland or the amorous Danish student who wanted to take me away for a weekend on the coast.

It could be a moment in time that somehow stuck in my brain like that crinoline under the cathedral dome, my mother’s sofa or singing folk songs at the Newman Center.

I’ve met a lot of people through a lot of living and they’ve left multiple impressions on my mind even if they weren’t readily apparent at the time. Yet by wandering those dark dusty passages of my memory alleys and byways, their personality traits/quirks/ flaws or subtle enounces often come to surface once again.

I want to remember what they felt like, smelt like, the vibes they were giving off even though most of us were oblivious to it at the time. I need to explore the essence of who they really were and then use that to recreate that person/s as my character.

If my avatar is someone I used to know, I have to glean from those scattered memories the most memorable incidents that defined that person. Joyce, Sheila, Marti, Susan, Pat, Sharon; the names define a moment, an incident and ultimately a part of me. But that process is never cut and dry. It took me six chapters before I figured out who Katherine really was in “Follow the Cobbler.”  I was a bit shocked at first but then it really made perfect sense, after the fact, that this woman would bubble up to the surface and burst forth on my written pages.

Some avatars are easy finds, others not so much. Yet all are a part of the wonderful discovery and refinement process that takes place when I finally seduce some fine woman into becoming my heroine, protagonist and, hopefully, memorable character in one of my stories.

Writing fiction is more fluid than real life but just as challenging.