What about the side characters, though, the ones the writer doesn’t climb inside of? If characters are only observed, not inhabited on the page, it’s easier to assume that they are complete creations, having little to do with the writer’s reality.

It is interesting, though, after drawing a central character out of my own substance, how much of me there is left over to scatter among others in the story.

Buddy in Little Dog, Lost carries the same longing for connection I talked about last week in Angie, the central character in Blue-Eyed Wolf. So does the boy who has to give Buddy up. So does Mark, who needs a dog. So does Charles Larue, the old man living alone in a mansion at the center of the town of Erthly. Every one of them brings to life some longing of my own.

And there are other points of connection with side characters. In Blue-Eyed Wolf, Maia, Angie’s adult friend, is the wife of her Episcopal priest. Where does Maia come from? It just so happens that for twenty-eight years I was married to an Episcopal priest, and while Maia certainly isn’t me—she’s much more up front than I ever dared be, for one thing—creating her as a character allowed me to dip into a deep well of feelings about the role I lived for so long. It was one in which I had, of necessity, to remain mostly silent, so finding an opportunity to speak twenty-five years after leaving that life behind gives me great energy and thus gives the character energy, too.

Long after I had begun writing Blue-Eyed Wolf, I was unsure about where I was going with it. The story I carried in my mind, in fact, had no middle, no action for Angie to take. Still, I kept inching forward, trusting that I would find what I needed, and eventually I did. I decided that, while attending the anti-war rally at the Pentagon with Maia, Angie would meet a draft resister, and that she would become involved in helping him escape to Canada. Great solution!

The problem was that I had a character, but no substance. For a long time, the young man in question was a blank. And then one day I remembered Charlie, a fellow I once knew, who, when I knew him in the early 60′s, was struggling to get his draft board to accept his status as a conscientious objector. Just thinking about Charlie dropped my character into my lap. Charlie was a philosophy major, an early hippie, a sweet and gentle man. And while I can’t pretend to write about someone I knew slightly fifty years ago, Charlie became, as Ruby’s ears did, the springboard for my character.

So will this character come entirely from outside me? No. He will believe what I believe about the military and about war. Meditation will be important to him, something that is important in my life. And when he comes back with Angie to Minnesota, he will share some of my own fascination of and caution in the wilderness. Once more scraps of the writer will enliven a character, even a side character, one I won’t inhabit.

If human nature weren’t so complex, so varied, fiction would be dull. It’s because we are all endless resources for discovery that characters can be made to seem to live.

I find it a fascinating concept to sort, even after nearly forty years of writing fiction. The question of how characters are brought to seeming life is never fully answered, partly because the process changes from writer to writer and story to story and partly because it remains somewhat mysterious, even for the one writing the fiction.

Let me extend the discussion into the young-adult novel I’m working on right now, Blue-Eyed Wolf. A fourteen-year-old girl, Angie, stands at the center of this story set in 1967 in a small town on the edge of the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area in northern Minnesota.

The story is built around two issues, an older brother who enlists and goes off to fight in Vietnam and the destruction of the wolves in Minnesota. Both issues impact Angie deeply. And both come out of my own convictions, convictions about the senselessness and immorality of war, all war, and about the myriad ways we destroy our natural world.

Angie, however, is not a stand-in for themes that could be more efficiently discussed in an essay. She is created out of emotional substance, my emotional substance.

Angie struggles with feeling abandoned, something which shows up at the center of every one of my stories, so obviously it has some deep—if somewhat hidden—meaning in my own life.

But abandonment—and longing for connection—aren’t the whole of Angie. She seeks religious/spiritual answers to the questions life poses for her, and that is something I sought passionately as a girl and continue to seek.

Angie also hates being fourteen and not yet having meaningful opinions on important topics—such as the war—that the adults around her argue about. I grew up in a home where conversation and argument—rational argument, but nonetheless argument—were indistinguishable from one another. A vigorous defending of ideas was essential to survival. And there I was, too young even to know what to argue about! And so I slip right inside Angie’s frustration.

Thus both my present searching and my long-ago dilemmas shape themselves into my character and, if I’m working well, bring her to life.

Did I start out writing Blue-Eyed Wolf by saying to myself, “I’m going to write about abandonment again?” Of course not. Such a mechanical decision would result in a mechanical story. Rather I started out by feeling Angie’s dilemma. And because I could feel it, I knew it was mine to write.

That’s the way stories work.