If I had to switch lives with a fictional character for a week, I know exactly who I would choose. I would choose the woman in my own book, The Dog Walker, which is probably a slightly unconventional answer because most people would reach for someone whose life comes with a castle, a superpower, a famous surname, or at the very least a handsome man waiting for them in a drawing room. I, on the other hand, would like to climb into the life of a woman I created myself. I have spent enough time writing her, putting words in her mouth, making her fall for things she probably shouldn’t, and watching her navigate the complicated business of being attracted to a man to whom she cannot simply hand over a user manual. After all that, I think I have earned the right to find out what it actually feels like to be her.
There is something strange about creating a fictional woman. In the beginning, you think you are in complete control. You decide what she looks like, where she lives, what she wants, what she fears and, most importantly, what she is going to do next. Then, somewhere along the way, she becomes inconveniently human. She starts making choices that you didn’t plan for. You put a perfectly sensible option in front of her and she walks straight toward the complicated one. You give her a man she should probably avoid and, somehow, she finds a reason to stay interested. You tell yourself that you are writing the story, but there are moments when it feels as though you are merely taking dictation.
That is the part of writing women that fascinates me. I can invent a situation, but I cannot always predict how a woman will experience it once she is inside it. If I were her for a week, I would want to know what she notices that I missed while writing her. I would want to know what happens inside her head when she first sees the beautiful man at the center of her story. Is she immediately attracted to him, or does she resist it? Does she notice his face first, or his manner, or something so small that even he might not realize he is doing it? When he looks at her, does she believe what she sees, or does she immediately begin questioning it? These are the things I find far more interesting than simply deciding that two people are attracted to each other.
I have always been fascinated by the little theatre that happens between men and women when attraction enters the room. We rarely meet another person without bringing our own history along with us. We arrive with old relationships, old disappointments, fantasies, insecurities and expectations that the other person knows nothing about. A woman can meet a man for ten minutes and unconsciously begin filling in the blanks. She can decide that he is confident, complicated, kind, unavailable, dangerous or secretly wonderful without having enough evidence for any of it. Men do exactly the same thing. We are all remarkably talented at writing biographies for strangers.
That is part of what I wanted to explore through Beautiful Men. The men may be beautiful, but beauty is only the surface of the story. What interests me is what happens after the first impression has done its damage. What happens when attraction collides with reality, when two people bring their expectations into the same relationship and discover that the person standing in front of them is not necessarily the person they imagined? Sometimes we fall for a person, and sometimes we fall for the possibility of who that person might become. There are also times when we fall for the version of ourselves that seems to emerge when we are with them, which can be even more difficult to walk away from.
If I could actually become the woman in The Dog Walker for seven days, I suspect I would spend very little of that time simply enjoying her life. I would be far too curious about her decisions. I would want to see the beautiful man through her eyes rather than through mine as the person who created him. I would want to understand what made her trust him, what made her doubt him, what she told her friends and what she kept to herself. I would want to know whether the things that seemed obvious to me as the writer were obvious to her at all. Most of all, I would want to discover what she understood about herself that I had not yet understood while writing her.
Perhaps that is why I find fictional characters so compelling. We spend so much time trying to understand other people in real life, but we rarely get the privilege of knowing what is happening behind their eyes. Fiction gives us a strange kind of intimacy. We can hear the thoughts that a character would never say aloud, understand the fear behind an apparently confident decision, and see the contradiction between what someone wants and what they are actually capable of choosing. We get to witness the private negotiations that make people human.
There is also something slightly embarrassing about realizing that when you write a woman, you inevitably leave pieces of yourself behind. You may give her a different childhood, a different job, a different relationship and a completely different wardrobe, but somewhere in her there is usually a little bit of you. It might be a fear you recognize but would rather not discuss, a romantic fantasy you have never admitted to having, an irrational stubbornness, or the particular kind of curiosity that makes you ask questions you probably shouldn’t. Sometimes you don’t even notice what you have put into a character until she says something on the page and you sit back thinking, “Oh, apparently I believe that.”
That may be the real reason I would choose her if I had the chance to switch lives for a week. I have spent so much time looking at her from the outside that I would like to experience her world from within. I would like to understand the moments I wrote without fully understanding them myself. I would like to know whether the choices I gave her feel as complicated from inside her life as they looked from mine. And after putting her through all the emotional complications that come with being a woman in a story called The Dog Walker, I suppose she deserves a week in which somebody else has to make the decisions.
I might even come back from those seven days with a little more compassion for her. More importantly, I might come back with a little more compassion for myself, because perhaps that is what fiction does when it works well. We think we are inventing other lives so we can escape our own, but somewhere along the way those imaginary lives begin holding up mirrors. They show us the things we desire, the choices we fear, the people we are drawn toward and the stories we tell ourselves about why we are drawn to them.
So if I had to trade lives with a fictional character for a week, I would choose the woman in The Dog Walker. I have already given her the beautiful man, the complicated feelings and the story. After all these years of being the woman behind the keyboard deciding what happens to her, I think it would be interesting to hand her the pen for a change and see what she does with me.
