Voices
I’ve got voices in my head.
We all do, really. The speak to us silently as we try to understand the world around us. When I meet people, I always try to figure out what makes them tick. What their motivations are, what goals they’ve set, and what they are willing to do to reach them. Why do they love what they love, or hate what they hate? What is their everyday life like, and how is that different from mine? What can I LEARN from this person, and thus enrich my own life?
It’s not a mercenary thing; I still have genuine feelings for or against all those people like any normal person, but I remain as driven try to grok people I don’t like and tend to avoid as people I love so much I can’t imagine living without. It’s just how my brain works.
The few things I manage to learn in the brief chances I get to interact with a person become voices in my head, little whispers of a louder personality. They’re just fragments of being with no overall driving anima, but each is a clue to the human condition as seen by one person. Frequently they have no immediate pertinent use, but I don’t mind. They’ll remain, part of the background chatter in my head, until they are needed. Sooner or later, most of them will be. The whispers are always talking to me, helping me make sense of the world around me.
Sometimes, just sometimes, those little whispers combine, like the T1000 in Terminator 2, into a larger whole. These whispers become a voice, longing to speak aloud; a finished person, with their own unique personality and life outlook, who lives in my head. They take over sometimes, when I am in a debate and suddenly switch sides out of some weird kinship one of my internal voices has with the topic. It makes me seem as if I’m just arguing for the sake of arguing, which annoys people, but it’s really not that at all. I’m just letting one of the voices speak for a minute. A lot of times, I’m as interested to hear what it will say as anyone. Those voices, and the data they mine from others, create whispers of their own.
But for the loudest voices, momentary use of my vocal cords is not enough. They need to speak and speak freely, in proper context and with their opinions attributed to them and not to Peter v. Brett, who probably disagrees with them, anyway.
I don’t just sit down and create characters for stories out of thin air. Major or minor, heroine or scullery maid, hero or stableboy, I just pull out a voice, or a handful of whispers, and let them breathe life into the character. Sometimes those characters become so fully formed that they are as real to me as people I meet on the street, and about as likely to behave the way I want them to.
I’ve got voices in my head.
Writing stories just lets them speak aloud.
“When I meet people, I always try to figure out what makes them tick. What their motivations are, what goals they’ve set, and what they are willing to do to reach them. Why do they love what they love, or hate what they hate? What is their everyday life like, and how is that different from mine? What can I LEARN from this person, and thus enrich my own life?”
I don’t think most people do this. I think here, in this thing that is so natural to you, lies your greatest strength as a writer. . . and also as a person. It is an inherently egoless process. I think most people look at others through the lens of their own goals. You are one of the few people I know who looks at others through the lens of their own goals.
That’s rare. Perhaps it wasn’t always innate in you. It is now.