Fictional Attachment Is Not So Fictional

I’m one of those people who gets easily attached to characters: ones I have written and ones I haven’t.  They become more than words on a page, more than actors on a screen.  They are as real to me as my own friends.  Because that’s what they are. 

Friends. 

A lot of people I know tell me that it's not normal to be so emotionally invested in someone who isn't real.  I was told yesterday that crying for an hour during The Originals season finale was weird. The fact that I was so destroyed, proud, happy, terrified, and hopeful in the span of an hour was a little much for one of my closest friends to understand when I tried to explain it to her.

"Oh, Amy.  You and Klaus.  You and the hot CW men," she had said.  

Yes.  Joseph Morgan is an attractive man.  Daniel Gillies is an attractive man.  But that's not the point.  That's never been the point.  It's about the story.  It's about the people.  

When I'm writing, I need to feel something.  I need to be attached to the characters whose lives I am controlling.  If I wasn't attached to them, why bother writing them?  If I don't have some sort of instinctual gut feeling about the characters - the people - I write, then why am I doing this at all?  

There has to be a connection.  Between writer and characters.  Between characters and readers.  The stories themselves are about connecting.  Connecting with an audience to share a message, share a hope, or share a tragedy are all reasons people write.  

I started writing because my best friends in the world moved ten hours away, and I was an awkward thirteen year old girl in middle school.  Making friends was hard for me.  It still can be.  But in my fictional world, I'm never alone.  I don't have to feel like that lonely girl who struggled with her personal identity.  I can be whoever and whatever I want to be in the fictional world.  True, I tend not to write characters based on myself, but I can give characters traits that I wished I did have, or that I strive to have. 

I wrote a story about this one particular character, and from the moment she was conceived in my mind, she hasn't left.  She's a badass with her own rules.  She fights for what she loves and doesn't stop until she's won.  She is everything I've ever wanted to be.  But she's still flawed.  She doesn't see herself the way that I do.  She sees herself as a broken woman with nothing to give and nothing to gain.  That's what makes her real.  That's what connects her to the nonfiction world of readers.   

Whenever I need a little boost myself, I think, "What would Xaverine do in this situation?"  Or when I need to be brave or strong, I say to myself, "Walk with your held high like Xaverine did when she finally took control of her life."  

So, though these characters are indeed ink on paper, they are also flesh and blood.  They are more than that even.  They are ideals.  They are inspiration.  They are a means of escape.  

Characters are people too.