When one writes, Charlie, one has to be like an actor and dive under the character's skin. One has to feel what the character feels, think, do whatever we want to make them do. One has to know what they went through, so we can be able to make the reader feel exactly what they are feeling and be totally identified with them.
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That's why writers are weird, at least. They are like profilers. They must search their most deeper or darker layers to find the murderer, the mother, the taxi driver, the doctor, the child, the drifter, the dog!
They must be that person; think, breath, eat, drink, smell who they are writing about. To live inside the characters world for as long as they are writing them.
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To enter this zone one must be completely obssessed with the character.
Everything about that character must be thought to the most insignificant detail. And then one falls inevitably in love. Completely. Irreversibly. Insanely in love.
The character is carved to perfection like a Gaudi cathedral or Rodin's hands. And then the character takes over you, starts to breath alone, or so it feels like that. And sometimes they do things that surprise you completely. They decide things alone. They say things you never thought they would say. Out of the blue.
This, of course, has a very logic explanation - it's the result of all the work processed by the author's unconscious, everything he absorbed about the character suddenly, one random day, starts pouring out as if the character had a life of it's own.
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This is the most magical moment in writing. The most wonderful one. The one that makes everything else worth while. All the mental exaustion of writing the first draft. All the dilemmas of having to make choices that will determinate the path the story will take. All the muscle cramps in one's hand from writing, sometimes a whole day without stopping. All the endless rewritings, to cut, to change, to carv, to add, but most of all to cut, cut, cut, until you reach the very essence of an idea, with exactly the right amount of words.ÇDLFºDÇLFÇLD
Sometimes, this magical moment reaches heights never once felt before. It happened to me just once, when I created an 8 year old brazillian street boy.
I became so obssessed with making him look credible I thought about him all the time. And one day my brain was tricked into believing he was actually there. I could feel him playing around me, everywhere. I had the strangest sensation of walking down a street and feeling he was just disappearing on the next corner.
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I had to kill the little boy. At a certain point in the story I knew he had to die. It made sense. It was one of the most difficult writing decisions I ever had to take. And then, another very strange thing happened. I cried. I cried while I was killing my character.ÇDLFºDÇLFÇLD
I cried because I had to, just had to kill him. I had no choice.
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