Mirror, mirror

There's a tendency among readers to view characters (and story ideas) as reflections of the writer. Somewhat disguised, yes, and maybe a little distorted, like images in a fun house mirror, but still somehow recognizably a manifestation of the author, and therefore a mouthpiece of the author's beliefs/morals/ethics/agenda. After all, everyone knows characters and ideas are birthed fully formed from the writer's imagination, like Athena springing all-wise from the brow of Zeus. A few cosmetic changes and they're good to go, and yet, when you strip away the wigs and fluffery, there's the creator, looking as sheepish and embarrassed as the Wizard of Oz caught in flagrante behind the curtain.

True, yes?

No. Or at least, not necessarily.*

Here's the way I see it. Characters are not reflections of who we are; they're refractions.

Our experiences, emotions, desires, fantasies, fears--the very nakedness of our inner soul--are the prism through which we shine our imagination. Yet what comes out the other side is entirely different. We birthed it, but it is not us. When you deconstruct it, it does not reform, whole, into the author. ** The prism only works one direction.

Thank goodness.

(*Some writers, either deliberately or perhaps with blithe obliviousness, do create idealized versions of themselves to be the hero/ine. These characters are known as Mary Sues, and they cause experienced authors to roll their eyes in dismay. Other writers see fiction as a vehicle for their own personal agenda. Ironically, what they usually end up with is not Truth but dishonesty and manipulation. Fiction, oddly enough, comes through as genuinely true only when the characters and ideas are allowed free rein to sort out their own destinies. Because only then can they tap into deeply human and universal themes.)

(**It may, however, be heavily stamped with his genetic material. Despite all my philosophical blathering about refraction and prisms, some fictional apples don't fall very far from the parent tree. But with that sort, you can usually smell the rot in fairly short order.)



She glanced toward Taliyr's tent, stately and alone in the center of camp, so close and yet so completely inaccessible. His men were huddled over one of their senseless games that involved tossing bits of carved and painted bone. The prince's gray-haired servant or apprentice or whatever he was perched on a nearby log, silently watching, though his gaze darted from time to time to the place where Alazne and Taliyr had entered the trees, as if he were tempted to follow them. But even had everyone been asleep or absent, she would not have dared enter the tent, not with the prince's hounds lying only a few paces away, relaxed but alert. She had seen the bloody remains of her father's wine steward, and was not likely to ever forget the sight.

She would have to find a way into the tent soon, though. It had become an obsession with her, that mirror, held so briefly in her hands before the prince had snatched it away.

It troubled her—and it sang to her, a song that teased her during waking hours and wound its way into her dreams at night. For in its clear depths she had glimpsed, not her own reflection, but a sight that burned through her brain like a fever: an oval table of ebony, so polished it was almost a mirror itself. On the table sat an ornate silver box, and in the box, nestled in black silk like a tiny, bright egg, gleamed a white stone.
(from The Knife-Giver)