Maybe I've Already Gone Crazy

[rowyn]

So Postvixen points out this LJ community, Soulbonding, saying that she likes it, but she's worried what would happen if the net.bastards got hold of it.

I'm reading, and reading, and reading through the intro (the community creator is a tad longwinded. ;) And my dominant thought as I'm looking at it is:

Doesn't everyone do this?

I've been an avid reader for almost as long as I can remember. (I can barely recall being very young and making up stories to go with the pictures in books I could not read. And refusing to learn to read from my sister. "I'll learn when they teach me in school!") The amount of leisure-reading I did dropped off dramatically in and after college, and has only recently begun to pick up again. But I still do a fair bit of reading.

One thing that I've always done when reading is interact with the book. I'll find myself doing this even with the most ordinary of non-fiction subjects. I read The Federalist Papers and imagine travelling back in time to talk to Alexander Hamiliton about how the country turned out. When I was little I imparted personalities to numbers. (3 was very selfish, as I recall, while 9 was my favorite.)

But my real flights of fancy are connected with fiction, particularly fantasy and science fiction. I can hardly read a book without inserting myself, or, more often, some additional imaginary characters into the narrative. Usually, my imaginary second narrative involves resolving the thorniest, or most persistent, problems in the story. Sometimes I'll employ powergaming tacitcs to solve difficulties, and sometimes I'll just provide my characters with additional insight, or a little special ability, to help them see things through.

When I was 12, I codified my cast of book-interfering characters, all with different and largely dramatically over-powered abilities. They were mostly about my age. There was my favorite, Diana, the Diamond Dragon. She was the only child of a race of shapeshifting diamond-skinned dragons who seldom reproduced. There was Liana, the daughter of Light, the fey, ethereal child of a diety. Crystal, a D&D-style sorceress with long black hair and pale skin (sound familiar, anyone?) with a mischevious bent and a wicked sense of humor. There were four others whose personalities were less well-defined, and who were employed less frequently. They dimension-travelled from one novel to the next, intervening and interacting their way through hundreds of stories.

I don't use them anymore, but I still conduct frequent imaginary interventions whenever I read anything.

It never occured to me that this might be unusual. I always thought that everyone did it. A few weeks ago, I mentioned this to Lut (who reads a lot more than I do), and he said, no, he never does.

Never?

Never.

Wow.

(This may be one of the reasons I read relatively slowly. I need to take the time to build up long scenes in my head, then discard them so I can get back to the events in the actual book.)

Anyway, this isn't my only use of alternate voices-in-my-head, but it's perhaps the most frequent one. And now I'm wondering: who else does do this? I'm sure I can't be alone. So if you're reading this, please let me know if you ever stage interventions in the course of books you're reading, or films you're watching. Or if you don't.

Maybe Lut is the oddity. ;)

Comments

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

You already know I do, so there's not much else to be said, there. :) But yeah, that's actually been a question that's really bothered me since I really started thinking about this stuff. On the night my friend K and I came up with what would become the Fluoroculture Reader, long before I even met postrodent and coined the F-word, he expressed his reservations that this would become some sort of elitist clique. He noted that we couldn't be sure that most people didn't already do the things we were talking about, and just never saw fit to talk about it.

We used my stepsister as an example -- a very nice, reasonably smart person, now a very capable mother of three. She didn't really talk about her fantasy life at all, and she only displayed signs of intellectual curiosity in little bursts -- she had to read some Toni Morrison for her college classes once, for instance, and gushed for a day about how much she missed reading. The basic question was, "Does my stepsister lay awake at 4 AM wondering if there's really a God?" I've never quite gotten up the nerve to ask her. I'd like to think the answer is yes.

Have you read Neil Gaiman's Sandman? I can't help but think of the characters Ken and Barbie. Both of them seemed like perfectly drab suburbanites on the surface. But one of them had the most debased, bland, materialistic dream life you could imagine... and the other was the beast-riding princess of a fantasy world for eight hours a night.

[rowyn]

Ken and Barbie were a little TOO normal to truly be normal, y'know? :) (Yes, I've read the series. In fact, in person, I look a lot like Thessaly, as drawn by Coleen Doran in "A Game of You", the later sequence featuring Barbie sans Ken.)

I did think it was a bit funny to see your reaction of "Wow, I'm not alone!" contrasting with my reaction of "What? You mean this ISN'T normal?" :) Though I expect from the general tenor of the "soulbonders", as an example, that they take their experiences a bit more -- seriously? personally? than I do.

But maybe that's the point -- that many of these exotic activities really are things that a broad spectrum of people could relate to, on some level. Like, even though I have no interest in the Superbowl, I've played CTF games ... and there's some similarity. When you think about it. ;)

Not alone at all.

[minor-architect.livejournal.com]

And for all these years, here I thought that I was the "odd one out" for doing this. Guess I needed this object-lesson in statistics. ;-)

I believe the first incarnation in my long line of "inserted characters" came about when I was reading the DragonLance series, waaay back in jr. high school. More recently, when my best girl buddy's husband got me into the X-Men series, I created one for that universe, too. Then this same character skipped across worlds and got involved with the members of The Authority (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1563896613/qid=1043626850/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-9091829-0173514?v=glance&s=books) (well, those in issues 1-12, anyway). My "inserted characters" have always been female and humanoid, though; no creatures as far as I can recall.

Re: Not alone at all.

[rowyn]

See? We're normal. Or what passes for normal, maybe. :)

My inserted characters have been mostly female, and mostly human, but not necessarily either. Occasionally one of my creations from roleplay or wherever will transition to the milieu of someone else's novel, which is the most common way a male will get involved. Non-humans, especially if you count all the appearances of Rowan the shuggoth, are far more common than men, however. :)

See!

[kagetsume.livejournal.com]

I said you were normal. ;D

I hate you.

[rowyn]

:)

Re: I hate you.

[kagetsume.livejournal.com]

Oh sure, blame the messenger! ;)

Re: I hate you.

[rowyn]

No ...


I blame your job. :)

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Actually I don't get talked to by my characters much, nor introduce them into stories in which they don't "belong". They only move if I puppeteer them, as it were.

I do have the tendency to want to rewrite stories, if they were not especially good. Event Horizon for instance, inspired that urge, as did Star Trek: Nemesis. But in these cases, I tend to try and stay a purist-- I'm reworking the story elements, demonstrating that I could write a better story than those hacks, as it were, rather than perking the story up with a twist of other-story.

[rowyn]

You are an editor at heart, Tufty, face it. :)

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say my own characters have a "life of their own." Sometimes they do things that surprise me. But for the most part, they populate the pages of books I read because I want to imagine them there. I like thinking about the possibilities, the other ways things might have gone.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Well, this shouldn't be too much of a revelation to you, since we've gone over this topic before, but there are a great many stories that I've reacted to, going over alternate endings in my head, imagining what could happen if I could insert myself and make things different. Those weird little fantasies have served as a major creative drive for me; I change details, change names, change places, change whatever I have to, and some core of the result finds its way into story ideas that I ponder (but never have actually written), or, more productively, into adventures for roleplaying games. (Of course, the PCs won't take the same path that I might have imagined myself doing ... but it still serves as a springboard for me to come up with something.)

On Sinai, I was most fueled by reacting to what other people were doing. (When most everyone shuffled off, there weren't as many people to react to!)

In fact, I was thinking about much this very same thing today, while driving downtown with Gwendel. I was thinking, actually, of writing up an entry on why I like Boba Fett. =) (Why is it, when I have Star Wars daydreams, I'm on the losing side of the Empire? If I fantasize about going to Hogwarts, why do I imagine that I would be in House Slytherin? In short, because it's hardly interesting to think about just doing what the characters in a story are already doing, just inserting myself as a substitute hero or hanger-on, on the same quest, with the same problems, from my point of view. It's more interesting to think about how things might be different, or at least be seen in a different light. What might happen if I turned the story over and propped it up on its head?)

But due to the lateness of the hour, the pounding in my head, etc., that can probably wait a bit. Basically, I just wanted to say that, if I'm following you correctly, you're not alone at all. I daydream, too, and on those rare occasions when I read stories that interest me, those stories will find their way into my daydreams.

[rowyn]

I'll admit, you were the one person that I was certain did this, too. I specifically remembered, at the end of the dream logs, that you said you were feeling sorry for Saraizadze (even if she was the bad guy!) and imagined sending some character, or yourself, to swoop in and rescue her. :)

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

I re-run the scenes with myself or one of my favourite friends in them, but I don't add characters or change plots significantly.

[rowyn]

That's a twist. I've populated my own daydreams with friends on occasion, but I don't recall ever using real people, other than myself, as characters for a daydream about a novel I'd read or a movie I'd seen.