The Day I Met My Protagonist

“You need to go find a quiet place. No distractions. Play some quiet music or light a candle. Let your mind relax and open it up to her. She wants to talk to you.”

I don’t know if I internally raised my eyebrow or I did it in real life as my writing instructor told me how to get unstuck. I couldn’t form my protagonist in my head yet. She was a young girl and she had things to tell me.

Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic talks about the ideas finding us, the stories find us, and if we don’t capture them that bit of inspiration may move on and find another conduit. This daemon, as Scorates called it, this spirit of inspiration, I knew she was the hero to my story but I didn’t quite know what her story was.

“Go to that place where you'r mind is open and relaxed, where it is before you fall asleep and your imagination is just sort of running around, and sit on that. See if your heroine is there.”

I closed myself into my porch, I got comfy on my big cozy reading chair and I lit a fire. I think it was mid autumn, it was a rainy, grey kind of day, the day that makes you want to snuggle up with tea and a book. I closed my eyes and tried to go there.

It reminded me of a meditation practice - which, when I really get into a good habit, takes me to a place of clear white light - I didn’t want to get there, up to the heavens. I tried to stay grounded on the chair but I let my brain go.

She did show up. She told me her name is Irina. She needs the book to be written. Her escape from the war, her survival story. She came to me as an adult and a child who were the same woman and I know that instinctively. You know when you see someone in a dream and they look completely different than real life, but you recognize them intimately? I knew her, and her story, and she was mad at me for not writing it yet.

So I started blocking out what she showed me. I wrote as much as I could with the information I had, there’s a lot of research into a time period and place I don’t know much about. And then I got stuck. So I went to her again.

This time I was in a new reading chair in a new apartment. She was annoyed with me, typical. I’d written her antagonist wrong. I should have consulted her, the woman was cruel and I’d written her too kind. I’m so sorry, I meditatively expressed to Irina, and she disappeared so I could go edit the work.

She points me in certain directions and tells me, in that not-quite-awake-or-asleep imagination place what I need to do. She’s the story, it’s not really mine. I’m just here to attempt to deliver it. I’m open and ready to receive the story.

I guess there’s that trope of the mentally unstable writer. I don’t think I’m insane, maybe just a little woo-woo? There are writers who work based on Tarot readings. Writers who scramble to scribble their dreams on journal pages at night. Writers who take a newspaper article about a mad widow and they just know that they know the story. I don’t think it matters where it comes from, just that we take the opportunity to let it come through us.

“I told you it would work. When you get stuck, go to that place. She’ll find you.”