Following Your First Impulse

Even as you scrutinize --

Photo by Christian Bowen on Unsplash

When my first son was born, he was almost three weeks early. There was no romantic moment of having him placed in my arms immediately after birth; I had last-minute anesthetic—I won’t go into details!—and woke up alone in a recovery room.

A kindly nurse wheeled me out on a gurney, and we stopped at the nursery. She pointed out my son behind glass, my first glimpse of him. It goes against everything we’re told… but his eyes were wide open, and he looked right at me. I know it.

I thought I’d prepared myself for that moment. I’d always rested solidly on the “nurture” side of nature/nurture to that point, and thought the young could be shaped in many ways.

But my first thought on actually seeing him in that moment was this: he knows exactly who he is, and I’m going to spend the rest of my life learning. The learning has been good, I’m quick to say.

I feel similarly about the characters who grow in my stories. They take action—or not. They say words, some surprising. They make choices. Seemingly on their own. True, I re-write and change up. But those initial pieces of evidence-of-character have their ways of coming into being. Popping up out of nowhere, as they say.

If this makes it sound a bit easier to create characters, no, it’s not. I’m doing the following-and-learning thing for the most part. There’s resistance in that. But curiosity is the saving piece: where are we going next?