Ok, sorry. I'm back on the horse

I was waiting for a friend from high school who is Pakistani and had just come home from touring the entire country to send me a personal review of his trip and of the atmosphere there. I saw him during the winter holiday and I e-mailed him, but he never seems to have gotten around to writing it up, and I confess I let things get away from me and didn't make posts long after I'd given up waiting for his.

I have been writing though. I'm working on a novel, if I haven't said so before, and I've been making a lot of good progress on it lately. I recently killed a character for the first time though, and I've since been dealing with the consequences.

It's funny, maybe more so to me than to anyone else, how I refer to it as if I was really the character's murderer, but I really am responsible for the death, in a manner of speaking. On the one hand, I've always had the good luck to feel like the best of my stories write themselves, as if I were only reading them out of the ether of existence and transcribing them as I go. But on the other hand, I must take responsibility for the fact that I do, in fact have a climax I'm working toward, and that if I were simply writing without trying to fit it into the story I want to tell, I might never have had to kill this man.

I mean, he's a totally ancillary character anyways, I only give him a name three pages before I kill him, and in point of fact I have killed villainous characters before. But this character is a friend and colleague of the more central characters I have familiarized the audience with so far, and so the consequences of his death appear in the thoughts and hearts of the others, who must deal with the loss of a friend.

The more realistic you're trying to make your story, I think, the more you have to behave as if your characters really are flesh and blood creatures, who react to the world you spin around them according to the chemical laws we all follow: how is their brain wired? how does x event make them feel? Are they angry? Sad? Turned on? Obviously it's unlikely that the event I'm talking about would result in my characters being turned on, even though death is known to be aphrodesiatic for others of the same species who witness or give testimony to it, and of course, there's the fact that in a company of 100 soldiers, plus eleven corporals and an unspecified number of officers, the statistics show that roughly a dozen of them will be homosexual, I'm just not prepared to have that reality assert itself in my story yet.

So what I guess I'm getting at, is that, in a way, a lot of story really does write itself. You, as the writer, do make certain decisions on the trajectory of the story, but in the course of making those events believable, you are bound by the circumstances you've already fashioned to write probably four pages on cruise control for every one of actual creativity you produce. I bet Gabriel Garcia Marquez didn't have this problem as much. He didn't have to make his characters actions believable, the whole point was that they were demonstrably caricatures of reality.

But in the end, I'd say that being a novelist had made me more credulous that there is a creator of the universe. I mean, once you set one law in motion, all you have to do is sit back and watch, maybe tweaking things every once in a while, in order to get the results you want. DNA for instance. Once the properties are worked out, all you have to do to get the species you want is, you know, blow the wind here, land a comet in the gulf of mexico there, and voila! Elephants! Sorry, most people would say 'voila, humans,' but the human ego, as the anthropologist on Colbert Report suggested last night, does not need any more stoking.

Peace and Love. I'll try to keep posting regularly, now that I am back on the horse.