Private Made Up Lives Should Generally Remain Private

NO, I'D BE A TERRIBLE novelist.  When I do my therapeutic writing I make up minor characters who are problems for the major ones, then start to give them a back story and they start filling out too much.  And the more backstory they get the more sympathetic I get to them.  I heard one fine novelist say she couldn't write a character she didn't like.  She's a genius, with me, it'd be worse than a Hallmark movie and I won't inflict it on readers.  That's what TV's for.  My writing is 100% for my own use and entertainment.

There is one evil character I haven't done that to, I figure I need to try to make up real villains to understand that part of things, real evil.  His name is Steve at times and Roger other times.  For entirely personal reasons.  

I remember reading a newspaper story about that specifically Women invented, exclusively women practiced Chinese script that they were worried was going to die out.  They bemoaned the ancient practice of their manuscripts being burned when they died so they would go into the afterlife with them, as if that were some huge tragedy.  Perhaps some of it was a real loss but I think the world would have been better off if a lot of what survived in print hadn't.  

Which reminds me of this, which I'll post because I know it will offend the tender sensibilities of one of those who trolls me:

The Library of America’s new Hammett collection, “Crime Stories and Other Writings,” contains a poignant textual note explaining that one of the stories could not be taken from Hammett’s original version because no copies of the magazine it appeared in still exist. Few are likely to mourn the January, 1928, issue of Mystery Stories, one of about seventy “pulps” then on the market—“pulp” as a category denoted the low quality of the paper, and presumably also of the contents and the readership—but the contrast of this rough extinction with the smooth, acid-free immortality of the volume at hand does point up the cultural irony of Hammett’s career. (His first pulp story, actually called “Immortality,” has disappeared without a trace.) But the contrast also points up the irony of the sweeping cultural mandate of the Library of America, for, as it turns out, the salvaged story—“This King Business,” printed from a later version—is hardly worth the effort of reading once.

And it is far from the only disappointment here. Hammett produced about ninety stories (and five novels) in the dozen active years of his career, many of them for badly needed money—he was capable of knocking out five thousand words a day—and many clearly executed beneath the level of his engaged attention.

Tough Guy: The mystery of Dashiell Hammett.  Claudia Roth Pierpont February 3, 2002

I try not to churn it out and I try to test my own boundaries.  No one's offering a financial incentive to do so,  I hope I wouldn't impose that on the world.  That's important, trying to write what you don't feel comfortable with.  That's how I start feeling sympathy for the characters I started out not liking.  As the same author mentioned above said when discussing the notable unlovability of real People, "Maybe God understands us better than we understand ourselves."