Member-only story
Write like a River
We don’t get to choose what is true. We can only choose how to live within that truth.
“Sign the accursed divorce papers.”
“I’ll not.”
“Loving you is like… like sleeping with cholera!”
What? Where did that come from? I thought, as the writer of the text, I was meant to control the directions and thoughts of my characters. Their choices are mine, are they not? Being the author, the head ‘scribe,’ I live vicariously through all of my characters, or at least I thought I did. If I have done all my preparation and character analysis, then why would a line like the above appear? Who would blurt out ‘cholera,’ let alone want to sleep with it?
Yet, in the story, my character spewed it with such venom, I had to respect it.
I realized then that the role I was cast into was no more than a chronicler or cartographer of a writhing Amazonian being. The meandering path of rivers all over the globe are no different than the choices of the human heart. As fiction writers, we are at the behest of our innumerable characters and the forces prescribed to challenge them. These creations choose their own course, no different than that mighty artery of Brazil.
I am not suggesting that the pen is driven by the fatalism and the neutered state of Vonnegut-type characters, tormented by…