I can’t speak to the relationship other authors have with the characters they create, but mine are real to me. I become my heroine. I see what she sees. I think what she thinks. I feel what she feels. I live in the time period and place where my characters live. Eventually, I must separate from them when the book ends. I become Alison again, separate, but still close to them.
After I finished writing The Confederates’ Physician (a historical novel that takes place during the last year of the US Civil War), my husband came into the library where I was sitting quietly at my desk. Apparently, I looked rather stricken.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“They’re gone,” I said, my grief evident.
“Who”? he asked.
“Ethan and Samantha,” I answered. “I miss them. They lived such incredible lives. They endured so much. But they’re dead. It makes me sad to think that they’re not living anymore. They’ve been dead for 150 years.”
He looked at me with a peculiar expression on his face and then said, “You do know they weren’t real, right, Alison? You made them up.”
Well, yeah, there’s that. Of course.
