Art of paranoia.. part 1

Okay, so characters aside a moment... I'm taking the keys myself to just ramble a little. This is D... or D-mun to most who know me on MSN in one group or twelve.

First, I'm a freak, okay? I admit it. I'm here more often than not at the keys and trying to be anyone but myself, but lately, I'm not sure that's wise. Being a writer in some fashion, I suppose that gives me license to have some level of schizophrenia. I do what the voices in my head say... well, at least I write down what they say. They're all separate and distinct, down to the colors and fonts that tend to match how they sound in my head. Cass, for instance, on another board than this, is bright purple Times, her brother is dark Times... um.. no pun intentionally placed, no matter how fitting that may be. That's neither here, nor there. The important thing is that I acknowledge their existence and allow their freedom to play as they appear at the forefront, posting up what they want to divulge about their thoughts and feelings.

I'm just the bystander. It's odd to go back and read something you know damn well you wrote yourself, but have that disconnected feeling that you're reading someone else's work. It's when your emotional 'forest for the trees' attachment to the text fades and you're left only with the context and essentially 'reading' it for the first time, experiencing the world as an outsider to your brain, trying to figure it all out like everyone would be who picked it up off the shelf. Is that a good feeling or bad one? Undetermined... it's a disconnect whatever it is and it's kinda creepy.

That having been said, lately I've been seeing my characters doing an equally creepy thing of showing up in the guise of real people around me. While I'm sure it's perfectly normal to draw off experiences and people around oneself to create worlds and the beloved characters within them, I'm not certain it's normal to create a character then come across their likeness on the street as a stranger. It's an odd phenomenon I've discovered and it's become rampant the more I create. Part of the paranoid little sidestep seems to come from the 'casting' process in my head. Not only does each character look a certain way in text, there is also a face, voice, mannerism and style particular to each character as I see him or her based on favored 'famous' faces. It's not uncommon to 'cast' someone familiar when writing and it's often encouraged in order to breathe more life into dialogue and actions, not to mention helping to keep the character consistent and believable. Again, that having been said, wouldn't you find it odd to create a character and give it a 'body' to use, only to find that the one chosen is actually quite similar to that character in ways you didn't expect?

Sure, now you want an example. Okay... next post... because this is going to get complicated and I've run out of time at the moment to explain...