Killing Your Babies
BY JIM YOAKUM
I’m a murderer. I’ve can’t even count how many people I’ve killed, abandoned, or simply left for dead. Men, women, children – the odd goat… I’m talking about fictional people of course, so put down the phone. As a writer I’m inventing people all the time – or rather, they’re introducing themselves to me, intruding in my life – and, at first I find them all very interesting and charming. One tells me he’s a barber who accidentally palmed a diamond necklace and hid it in a snowman in the middle of a snowstorm for safekeeping. Another tells me that he’s a ‘retired serial killer’ who is all up-in-arms because some young upstart is using his m.o.
All very interesting and usually I begin to write out their tales as they tell them to me – but (and all writers surely know this feeling) sometime (usually around page 60 or so) their voices become… fainter. Their story begins to feel more like an anecdote and… then the script... just… stops…. dead.
Sometimes I am able to go back (months even years later) and revive them, but usually they… dust… die. I hold no services for them, no matter how fond I was/am of them. No notices submitted to the obits column. No, I simply file their story away and move on. Sad? Yes. Cold? Perhaps. But life is about moving forward – although the corpses can pile up and the memory does linger… Let’s see, there was story about the princess from a small European country who dreamed of being a writer… the one about the guy who creates alternate realities in his dreams… the ad man who becomes involved in a banana revolt – oh! Actually he was one of the lucky ones. His story lay dormant for about three years until suddenly, quite out of the blue, he began speaking to me again (must have gotten himself an iPhone) and so I was able to finish his tale. The others, well, to be honest I don’t hold out too much hope for them. They’re all fine people and I’m pulling for them and all but…
Writing is not just about creating life, it’s also about killing your babies. It’s about knowing when to nurture a character, when to keep them on life-support - and when to just pull the plug. It’s about being God. At least God with a small ‘g’ for you are, indeed, creating your own world(s) and peopling it with characters of your own creation. Killing a character, or their story, is never easy and, over the years, I’ve probably killed more people than Kevorkian - but I’ve also given birth to some incredible folks. Neither one is easy, but who said being God was easy?