Missing My Characters

The launching of a book comes with many emotions. I liken it to when I first sent my young daughters off to kindergarten, then it was college, and then on their wedding days. There are highs and yes, there are even lows. Such an achievement, a milestone, a rite of passage. But with it comes apprehension and then a melancholy period when you realize the time is here. You’ve let it go. From your mind to the paper to the world, it is no longer in your sole possession. Does it get easier? With each book perhaps? With success and recognition? Setting it free opens it up to appraisal and insight and hopefully enjoyment. After all, that is the goal. I’ve received many motivating and tender reviews thus far, but one of my most curious feedback is the one I want to talk about here.

Some of my early readers were long-time friends, people who knew me well. After finishing the book, I was hearing things from them like, “As I was reading Elizabeth’s Mountain, I was thinking, I know this author…I have so many memories with her…we went to school together or, we talked for hours over drinks. As I began to read your story, you were there, in the back of my mind, and then you weren’t. It’s like you left and the characters and storyline took over.” Wow! Is there any compliment better than that?

I’ve thought about those comments more and more. How the author needs to become invisible. Authentic characters enrich a story and if their creator does a good job, an author’s invisibility is a positive. The story and its characters must take on a life of their own. It happens to writers all the time - that sensation of living a double life. One veritable, one imaginary. Our characters become so real to us that it shocks us sometimes that they aren’t. My husband and I were talking one day about something someone did in a particular situation and I said, “Elizabeth would never have handled it that way,” and my husband said, “Who’s Elizabeth?” Elizabeth is one of the main protagonists in my novel. Sometimes, I’ve even asked myself, “What would Elizabeth do, or Amanda, or Joe or Jesse?” I gave them life and now I’ve let them go.

Elizabeth’s Mountain is the story that woke me up one morning and never let go. I believe it will stay with me forever.

“When you turn the last page of this novel, you’re not thinking, ‘My, what a lovely story!’

When you turn the last page, you think, ‘I’m really going to miss these folks.”

-BookViral