It’s been said before and today it’s my turn. When you create fictional characters, they’re likely to make decisions and proceed in directions you didn’t anticipate when you started them. It isn’t that they act perversely – rather, you didn’t get far enough into them, before working with them, to consider their ramifications. They are like actual children. They demand their own consistency.

In love with characters that I conceive
to populate my fiction,
I’m amazed they use their own extremities,
believe in their own fantasies,
become as crazed by circumstance
as any valued friend.
They cannot contradict themselves with grace.
They’re always as consistent in pretend
as in the flesh,
in moment as in place.

I dreamed the creatures,
just as I was dreamed.
I made them out of rampant energy.
Converting immaterial
I screened it for evocatives.
In time I see the characters,
but space they don’t engage
beyond the thin dimensions of a page.