"murder your babies"

Chloe showed up in my bedroom while I was working on my PhD proposal the other day. She lay down on my comforter with her boots on, started eating my after 8 mints, and asked when I was going to do something with her already.

I’ve got a relationship with some of my characters. Maybe this is a common thing, I have no way of knowing, but in my case it’s funny because of the way I write. Literary short stories are taken slowly, built from the ground up, carefully researched; if I spend enough time on it, the characters become real to me. It’s not a conscious thing, I don’t sit down as I’m working and decide what her favorite food is or how she feels about her mother, but I come to know these details through proximity with the character – this means that every character in the 16-story cycle that is my undergraduate dissertation has a fully realized backstory, and each of those stories has at least three important characters.

That’s the literary fiction. The money I’ve made from writing has come from writing to prompts and selling to specific markets. It’s usually three days between when I find a call for submissions and when I send out a piece, if it takes me much longer to come up with something chances are it’s not going to be good in time to be submitted for that prompt. Usually in this case the characters leap up fully realized as well, though not quite as three dimensionally as when I’ve had time to hang out with them. And if the story is more dependent on plot than character – romance usually, because when you’ve got a 3,000 word limit kissing is more important than character development – they might be more cardboard cutouts with names than real people.

The less real the characters are to me, the less I mind changing the story to satisfy the market. The opposite is also true.

Chloe has been floating around in my psyche for five years now. I’ve tried to write her story over and over, but it clunked every time. I couldn’t get a handle on her or her situation, but I knew she was there. The summer before my senior year I lived in a tiny house on the edge of the barrier islands in Virginia, with no phone, no internet and no friends. I’d been directed to draft out the beginning of my Honors project and had no ideas, so I spent a lot of time crabbing, sunning, and target shooting. One of those afternoons with my brother’s gun on our upstairs porch, thinking about the ex that wasn’t leaving me alone, I wondered how hard it would be to shoot someone. And Chloe appeared, and allowed herself to be frantically drafted. Since I’m lazy, her house is that house, adjusted very slightly. Of course, my advisor eventually axed the lines that were my door into her story, the lines that I began with and that I liked best. They do say kill your darlings, a piece of wisdom I often misquote as “murder your babies.” And it doesn’t matter, as I still have Chloe: almost thirteen, dirty, foul-mouthed, quiet, nearly feral, mostly self-sufficient, and borderline sociopathic. She’d probably be my favorite even if she hadn’t been my door into so many things. And sometimes she shows up unexpectedly, gets her feet all over my furniture, and tells me that there’s more coming, she’s just not sure where from yet. So I wait for an editor who doesn’t want me to make her a nice girl, doesn’t want me to erase her sociopathic tendencies, because I feel like I owe this character something, if only her integrity.

And, since I like them and want them to go somewhere, here are those lines that I took out in the final draft:

Sometimes, when I’m holding the .22 like that, getting a careful sight on my target and breathing out really slow, I wonder how much harder it would be to shoot a real person. It’s a bigger target, so I’m guessing it would be easier, but they say that when it comes to shoot someone with a face, that’s got a name and is looking at you, even real soldiers have a hard time doing it. Maybe that’s why so many people get shot in the back, like Cabel Bloxom. Before he died, I would be up on the porch shooting, and wonder if I’d be able to shoot him if he did come for me and Renee, like he said he would. Or, I would wonder if I’d be able to keep from shooting him. Everyone around here knows we’re home on our own all summer long. They say that Mama ran off to Atlantic City, but I know better. If someone came after us, there would be no one but me to stop them.