Endings
There’s a certain feeling of grief when you finish a novel that has nothing to do with the anxiety and pain of finding a publisher but rather is inspired by the intimate relationships you have established with your characters. It’s even better when your readers miss them and ask about what happened after the book ended, when they vanished into some stage of your creative life, not exactly dead, after all one of them is probably you. One of my novels inspired such attachment I had people at readings inquiring after her well-being at college as if she was real and possibly having a tough freshman year. That was very encouraging but it also reminds me of the nature of this work: you create them, manipulate them, love them and finally shoot them up with massive doses of coma inducing drugs.
I like to deny most things like the good, Irish-Catholic-heathen girl I am but without this feeling of loss and longing I’m pretty sure the writer has failed to discover the inner lives of the characters leaving most readers feeling detached and annoyed. I tried to read a certain vampire trilogy but found myself bored with how shallow they were, why did they fall in love to a point she was willing to risk death to be with him and who cares if their skin gleams if you don’t find them interesting? I tried to write a novel about a terrorist after being inspired by the novel The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, by Heinrich Boll where a woman is in love with a terrorist and subsequently hounded by the media enough to murder a tabloid journalist. My terrorist was famous for his attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II by Mehmet Ali Agca. The significant strengths of Boll’s book are too numerous to mention but the flaws in mine were quite clear, no one had a clear motivation, making up a plot based on the fact you found the pope-shooting terrorist cute wouldn’t make a novel work. Also, I admitted to myself this terrorist fantasy like my Dracula fantasy was probably a way to make sex acceptable without feeling guilty. Yadda, yadda. Not a plot!
“New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.” —Lao Tzu
So, I frequently base my characters on real people, exes, family, friends, and myself. Some of the grief is probably caused by the reality of time passing and the ache of looking back and regretting things, of a person who was pivotal in real life and a novel, dying young, reclaiming a part of yourself that has left your life and then losing that part again. Now I am finishing a novel that is very much about my experience of motherhood, a baby that possibly saved my life after the death of my beloved sister and a marriage that failed. These memories crowd my current life with all their vitality but then like summer lightning, they disappear, receding into the darkness.
They don’t talk to me or tell me what to do but they talk to each other, they laugh and cry and fall in and out of love. The baby is nearly twenty-six, the best friend died of a brain tumor, the ex has several more wives and another child, and my wonderful father is dead. Still I pull them close and then let them go again in order to move forward, to find the words to set them or put them to sleep so I can move on to another place and time.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach