[caption id="attachment_808" align="alignleft" width="152"] photo c. Grizelda Holderness.[/caption]

By Nimue Brown

It’s a strange business, being a writer. Some of it, is about careful, deliberate thinking. The plotting. The development of a structure for your book. The editing. A lot of the time there are sensible, technical things to be getting on with.

Some of the time, there are imaginary people having conversations inside your head.

Perhaps the strangest thing about being an author, is how difficult it can be to get the imaginary people to do what you wanted. They rapidly develop minds of their own, and intentions that were not in the original plot notes.

It can be a bit mad. I mean, there you are, making people up, and what you make up are people who don’t do what you made them up specifically to do. There are vast doctoral theses to be written about people who don’t seem to be able to manage their own imaginings, I suspect. It’s like having an imaginary friend who abandons you. Why are we not in control of our own creations?

But then, how in control is anyone, when it comes to their own thoughts? How many random, uninvited, unwelcome ideas wander through the average person’s head during the course of any given day? Maybe writers aren’t more mad than average, maybe we just notice it more because our jobs require us to pay attention to all the little voices, where for most people these are a bit more like white noise.

Oh, and apparently most of us do have little voices in our heads. It’s normal. It’s only illness when they take over, or spend all their time screaming about killing people. When they just wonder about arsenic in the jam, and hiding bodies in drop toilets, it’s fine. I’ve been told.

My imaginary people are on strike at the moment. They all want better pay and conditions. Which is tricky given my habit of writing about poor people and social issues.

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