“I am in my prime. Professionally. Financially. Intellectually. Not sexually. All things considered, my sexual prime came in the back of a 1970 Nova and went out the door of a judge’s office three months later.”

I crack me up. I really do. Yesterday, I randomly tweeted the above out of one of my books that I thought was one of my better lines. That’s Finn Marston,¹ from Lion’s Share narrating the circumstances of his shotgun wedding at 19.

That’s funny (yes, it is; fight me), but the real story is in Lion’s Share’s opening line.²

In 1998 (I think) my mom, brother, and I set out on a road trip to Salt Lake. I cannot, for the life of me, remember why. I stayed in Provo with an internet friend, who was getting divorced from her asshole ex-husband, and her two single-digit kids. She was broke, her soon-to-be-ex wasn’t paying child support, and she didn’t have a job so she was on assistance. We had a couple of late-night heart-to-hearts. She had re-dedicated her life to Jesus, in non-Mormon evangelical Christian parlance. She was going to church, paying tithing (on her meager income), and had just gone to the temple to take out her endowment (fornication and adultery are verboten). She was wearing her garments appropriately and faithfully. She was focused, determined, locked in.

Fast forward a year or so. We were in a Mormon singles chatroom, and we were in DMs, chatting about her life. She was still broke. Ex still wasn’t paying child support. She was doing well with church and she was dripping with new zealotry.³

I had noticed that in the general chat, she was flirting with this guy from a state somewhere far northeast of Utah.⁴ I remembered his deets,⁵ and as far as I could tell, he was a very nice, decent, hard-working, spiritually upright fellow who loved his kids. Said his ex cheated.⁶ There were no warning bells as to his person. However, there were some warning bells as to how life with him would be:

• divorced
• paying a shit-ton of child support
• lived in a broken-down mobile home in a broken-down mobile home park in a broken-down small town (bonus points for honesty!)
• didn’t have a job
• didn’t have a trade, marketable skill, or defining occupation

Keep in mind: You don’t go to any chat room looking for a sugar daddy. Men with money aren’t there, they don’t want women over thirty and/or divorcées with eight kids, and moneyed Mormon men aren’t single anyway.⁷ I didn’t care what anybody else’s motives were, but mine was to find a nice, decent guy to marry and have children with.⁸

So she was chatting with this nice (I’m sure) gentleman, and I asked her very delicately WTF she was doing talking to a down-and-out dude when she was also down and out.

“He’s nice.”

That was a plus, but I thought she should be looking for someone a tidge more solid. Say what you want about a woman’s material target-seeking, but love does not conquer all, especially at the beginning when you’re thirty-five, broke, and have at least four kids between you.

I left her alone about it because it was not my business and she was a big girl and she was going to do whatever she wanted to do regardless of any wisdom I might throw her way. Free advice is almost always worth what you pay for it.

Over the next few weeks, she regaled me with the wonderful gestures this dude made. She was in luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuv. Nobody saw that coming, nosirreebob.

Then one day, in the general chat, this happened:

Well, that was alarming. I immediately opened DMs.

Oh boy.

The plan: She would fly to his state with her kids, who would effectively be their chaperone. They would meet in a hotel by the airport, as it was some distance away from his home. They would have 2 hotel rooms, one for him (I can’t remember if he brought his kids), and one for her and her kids.

Uh huh.

Ooooookay.

So she and her kids got there. He’d filled her room with balloons and flowers and just all-around romantic goodness. Normal getting-to-know-you IRL-post-internet stuff ensued … for about 1/2 hour. The kids got put in the other hotel room so they could make out. That was all it was. All clothes on, everything above the neck. I nodded approvingly.

“But then it just slipped in.”

… … … “BECKY! THE FUCK?!”

“Twice.”

I waited for years to be able to use that line in a story, but it never fit. Then one day I had a dream about a widow getting together with her widowed-father-in-law-turned-BFF, woke up, said (out loud) “Oh, that’s an interesting idea,” forgot about it, went about my day, which included a stop at Young House Love DIY blog, and an idea was born.

And fuck me if I wasn’t going to start that out with

Yesterday I had surgery for the first time ever (not counting wisdom teeth). It was elective and went well, so everything’s fine.

Anyway. I very rarely go out. I’m a serious hermit. When I do go out, I avoid people like the plague. I don’t care to be touched or talked at by total strangers. I’m very conscious and protective of my personal space. But.

I watch.

Maybe out of the corner of my eye. Maybe I use my ears to see (comes from years and years of transcribing for a living—you get to know people pretty well by voice inflection). Maybe a small gesture catches my eye. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it does happen enough that I get lots of ideas for characterization. I take lots of notes in my head. I’ve even taken notes on paper.

They never know I’m watching them.

Years ago, I was eating lunch at a restaurant, reading a book (natch), and three programmers for a medical software company headquartered here were talking in not particularly low tones. They were talking about a software they were selling that controlled the machines that administer insulin doses to inpatients. They’d found a bug that multiplied the dosages many times what was prescribed and it’d killed a few people before they caught it.

I managed to keep my jaw from dropping on the floor and went for pen and paper with great stealth. (Yes, I still have that conversation written down.) I went home after work and started writing as fast as I could. Before I got the story finished, though, it popped up on Law & Order, so I didn’t bother.

They never knew I was listening.

So yesterday.

My preop nurse caught my eye. I don’t know why. She was average height, with curly red-blonde hair, average facial features, and an overweight apple-shaped torso—in short, very similar to how I envision Giselle from The Proviso to look. She wasn’t particularly bubbly; she didn’t smile; she was even a bit terse. She was relaxed but confident. She wasn’t ugly nor truly fat. Just…plain. Ordinary. Average. Whatever it was, which I don’t know, it made her very attractive. In fact, I told Dude she was very pretty.

Next up: My surgeon. He delivered TD #1. Until I went to him last month to say, “I want this procedure,” I never really knew how genuinely caring he is. I’ve very rarely had that from the doctors in my life, but this guy … I’ve never written a doctor as a character before, mostly because my relationships with them as (by turns) patient, investigator, and vendor have never really been good ones. But now I have a model from which to write one.

Last: My operative nurse is someone I’ve known for years, from church. At church, she has always been very dour and standoffish. Her husband is affable enough, and he’s our new bishop (THANK HEAVENS!!!). But I’ve never really gotten to know her because of the brick wall she wraps around herself. But yesterday… Yesterday she was all smiles and genuine warmth and caring. I’ve never seen that before, and now it makes me wonder what about being at church makes her spine stiffen and her smile to go away.

I see people watching people all the time. They sit and watch people go by… You can tell. It’s the people watchers like me—the ones who seem to not be paying attention to anything around them—who could turn you into a character one day.

And you will never know.

We talk about them as if we have no control over them, as if they’re driving the train. In a review of Stay, reviewer Julie Weight said,

When you read Jovan’s books, you just know these characters are like real people to her. She knows them like she knows her own family. Actually, she knows them better than her own family, since she knows their motives and what they’re thinking. If you get her talking about them, you’ll forget that they are just the imaginary people who live in her head. She makes them real, however and wherever she presents them. And because of that, she also agonizes over their lives – to the point where sometimes it seems like she forgets that she’s the one in charge of their lives! All of this familiarity and love for these people comes out in the writing and the story. Because she believes in them, you will start to believe in them. She writes the characters and the stories so well that you, the reader, will become wrapped up in their lives and care deeply about what is going to happen to them.

Emphasis mine.

Here’s the thing: All that’s true. It’s really the subconscious doing the heavy lifting—we all know this. We let it do its thing and we talk to our imaginary friends and let them dictate their lives to us because we are their scribes, but …

Then they stop talking.

What do you do then?

I didn’t realize that this can get into scary territory until I was talking to another n00bish writer who speaks in the “Character X told me to do this” vernacular. It’s cute. I like knowing I’m not the only crazy person on the planet.

Then I realized … He wasn’t taking any responsibility for the words on the page, and it drew me up sharp. He didn’t know what to do when his characters/subconscious stopped. He didn’t have any confidence in the work of the conscious mind. Worse, he wasn’t sure it was even necessary to employ the conscious mind (i.e., himself) because he had himself convinced he couldn’t write without channeling the imaginary friends and taking their dictation.

My subconscious comes up with some amazing shit. Seriously amazing. Stuff my conscious mind would have had to work for decades to come up with. People are amazed when I say I don’t outline, but I don’t. At least, not in any recognizable fashion and certainly not the way I was taught in fifth grade. (I always had to write the paper first and backward engineer the outline; it was a pain.) Things tie together in ways I don’t know how it happens, and I seem to write by serendipity. It seems automatic.

But then the free-flow stops.

At some point, the writer has to take responsibility for who these people are, what they do, what they say, how the story winds out. It’s all fun and games while the subconscious is doing its thing and the writer can pretend these people are real and are simply giving dictation.

But the subconscious is notoriously unreliable and sporadic. What do you do when it takes a break and you can’t?

You start putting words down on paper.

Conscious words, words you choose and arrange, laboriously.

You take responsibility for those words.

And for all the ones you wrote when you were taking dictation, because it doesn’t matter that nobody knows how the subconscious works, what you wrote is still from you.

All you.

There are no imaginary friends.