Seeing the things that aren't there
There's one important trait that fiction writers and mathematicians share. Both have to take things that don't exist and treat them as if they do.
I was doing a book event a while back, when an older gentleman came up to my table and asked what my Mathematical Nights books were about. After he'd heard some of my usual pitch, that it was about a girl who could see math-impaired ghosts, vampires, etc., he frowned and gruffly replied, "I don't believe in any of that stuff." I replied that I didn't either, but I could imagine what they might be like.
Similarly, any middle schooler can tell you that negative numbers don't have square roots, but one day long ago, mathematicians decided to imagine what the square root of a negative number might look like, and then explored what the consequences might be. "Imaginary numbers" turned out to be quite handy for a lot of things.
Mathematicians are good at metaphors, too. After all, what is a metaphor, if not the substitution of one thing for another in order to gain a new perspective or a better understanding? Mathematicians do that all the time.
There's one advantage mathematicians have. Non-mathematicians can't tell the difference between the "real" and "imaginary" things they talk about, so people generally don't think they're crazy. Writers, on the other hand, constantly have to watch what they say around non-writers, lest they think we're delusional for talking about fictional people as if they were real. We have to. It's how we do our jobs. We know exactly what we're doing. Well, most of the time.
This real-vs-imaginary issue can get especially tricky if we're talking about The Muse. Just what is that, really? Is there one muse for everybody, or does each person have their own? Does it look like a person, or is it some kind of non-corporeal creative force? And if it looks like a person, does it look like a woman, and doesn't that just mean you're engaging in sexual fantasy when you should be working?
Okay, maybe people don't ask that last one, but I was on a roll.
I suspect that every writer has a unique answer. Yes, I do have a muse. She's more than that, actually, because she also serves as my anima, in the Jungian psychological sense. Not exactly, but close enough. She is a mysterious entity, without her own name or her own face. I only know her as The Little Girl, and she's been appearing in my dreams since the mid-90s. She always appears as a tween-ish girl, and until recently, she had never worn the same face twice. Her first repeat performance was in the form of my Michigan niece Leyna, who is now the right age for it, and there have been a couple of other repeats since then, too. I've learned how to recognize her no matter what face she has, though. She does different things in my dreams, some reassuring and some distressing, and sometimes the dream is about her absence. She has only appeared sexualized once, and that was a very pointed message about how she does not relate to me.
As you can see, I know quite a bit about this person who isn't there. It is a relationship of sorts. Yes, she lives in my head, but she's from the part I don't control consciously. She has a lot more independence than the characters I write, and does a lot more things I don't expect or understand.
When Royal Fireworks did a dyslexia-friendly edition for Night of the Paranormal Patterns, their staff artist Christopher Tice did a new set of illustrations - and he captured my main character, Lennie Miller, perfectly. I don't know how he did it, because I never thought my powers of description were that good, but his creation is exactly what I always imagined Lennie looked like. And it's been twenty years since I created her too, originally for another book that has mercifully gone unpublished. If The Little Girl was ever going to have a face of her own, this would be it:
A couple of years ago, I wrote, "The love of my life is a girl on the imaginary plane. We have a complex relationship." That's a math joke. See, math and writing. They have more in common than you know.
I was doing a book event a while back, when an older gentleman came up to my table and asked what my Mathematical Nights books were about. After he'd heard some of my usual pitch, that it was about a girl who could see math-impaired ghosts, vampires, etc., he frowned and gruffly replied, "I don't believe in any of that stuff." I replied that I didn't either, but I could imagine what they might be like.
Similarly, any middle schooler can tell you that negative numbers don't have square roots, but one day long ago, mathematicians decided to imagine what the square root of a negative number might look like, and then explored what the consequences might be. "Imaginary numbers" turned out to be quite handy for a lot of things.
Mathematicians are good at metaphors, too. After all, what is a metaphor, if not the substitution of one thing for another in order to gain a new perspective or a better understanding? Mathematicians do that all the time.
There's one advantage mathematicians have. Non-mathematicians can't tell the difference between the "real" and "imaginary" things they talk about, so people generally don't think they're crazy. Writers, on the other hand, constantly have to watch what they say around non-writers, lest they think we're delusional for talking about fictional people as if they were real. We have to. It's how we do our jobs. We know exactly what we're doing. Well, most of the time.
This real-vs-imaginary issue can get especially tricky if we're talking about The Muse. Just what is that, really? Is there one muse for everybody, or does each person have their own? Does it look like a person, or is it some kind of non-corporeal creative force? And if it looks like a person, does it look like a woman, and doesn't that just mean you're engaging in sexual fantasy when you should be working?
Okay, maybe people don't ask that last one, but I was on a roll.
I suspect that every writer has a unique answer. Yes, I do have a muse. She's more than that, actually, because she also serves as my anima, in the Jungian psychological sense. Not exactly, but close enough. She is a mysterious entity, without her own name or her own face. I only know her as The Little Girl, and she's been appearing in my dreams since the mid-90s. She always appears as a tween-ish girl, and until recently, she had never worn the same face twice. Her first repeat performance was in the form of my Michigan niece Leyna, who is now the right age for it, and there have been a couple of other repeats since then, too. I've learned how to recognize her no matter what face she has, though. She does different things in my dreams, some reassuring and some distressing, and sometimes the dream is about her absence. She has only appeared sexualized once, and that was a very pointed message about how she does not relate to me.
As you can see, I know quite a bit about this person who isn't there. It is a relationship of sorts. Yes, she lives in my head, but she's from the part I don't control consciously. She has a lot more independence than the characters I write, and does a lot more things I don't expect or understand.
When Royal Fireworks did a dyslexia-friendly edition for Night of the Paranormal Patterns, their staff artist Christopher Tice did a new set of illustrations - and he captured my main character, Lennie Miller, perfectly. I don't know how he did it, because I never thought my powers of description were that good, but his creation is exactly what I always imagined Lennie looked like. And it's been twenty years since I created her too, originally for another book that has mercifully gone unpublished. If The Little Girl was ever going to have a face of her own, this would be it:
A couple of years ago, I wrote, "The love of my life is a girl on the imaginary plane. We have a complex relationship." That's a math joke. See, math and writing. They have more in common than you know.
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