Origins of Fictional Characters: Creating Life on the Page

ABSTRACT

There are many perspectives from which the origins of fictional characters may be explored. In this essay the author draws from the voices of a selected group of creative writers who openly describe the manner in which their life experience and personal psychology play important roles in the creative process giving rise to their fictional characters. For some writers whose experience of loss or trauma informs this process, the ongoing act of writing is felt to be essential.

KEYWORDS:

• Fictional characters
• creative writers
• trauma
• Sheila Kohler

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ See, for example, Porter (2004) on the art of characterization in Flaubert’s creation of Emma.

² For a study based upon scholarly research regarding the complex elements contributing to Woolf’s creation of fictional characters in her novel Mrs. Dalloway, see Emre’s (2021) The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway.

³ Freud himself may be included among those who used writing to memorialize lost loved ones: his beloved daughter Sophie. His most imaginative piece of writing, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, was published in 1920, just as the Spanish flu pandemic was ending. Only weeks after Freud’s daughter Sophie was killed by this influenza virus, Freud introduced the concept of the death instinct for the first time. In Beyond Freud reports the now famous fort-da game, first observed by Freud when watching his grandson, Sophie’s son. In a recent study (Griffin, 2022), I argue that the formal structure of the text contains elements that capture Freud’s effort to keep something of his feelings for and with his beloved Sophie alive on the page.

⁴ I recommend two additional works of historical fiction that explore the lives of imaginative writers and the nature of their creative process. The Blue Flower, written by the remarkable Penelope Fitzgerald about the life of the writer Friedrich von Hardenberger, who came to be known as Novalis. And Edmund White’s Hotel de Dream, about the last days of Stephen Crane’s life. In the latter, White not only imagines the character Stephen Crane struggling to live and write as he lay dying from tuberculosis. He goes so far as to write – in Crane’s imagined voice – “The Painted Boy,” a novella which legend has it was Crane’s last work that was destroyed because it would have ruined Crane’s literary reputation. It was about a chance meeting he had with a teenage New York male prostitute. In this novel White, a gay man who now has the freedom to write what he wishes about same-sex love and sexuality, writes the story that could not be published in 1900.

⁵ I also read the novel Jane Eyre in preparation for the interview.

⁶ From Hermione Lee (2021). In London Review of Books Podcast, November 27, 2021 London Review Bookshop Podcast: Revivalism: Penelope Fitzgerald, with Susannah Clapp and Hermione Lee on Apple Podcasts.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fred L. Griffin

Fred L. Griffin, M.D., is a Personal and Consulting Analyst at the Dallas Psychoanalytic Center. His many publications include the 2016 book Creative Listening and the Psychoanalytic Process: Sensibility, Engagement and Envisioning (Routledge).