This is where I admit something weird about myself.
Have you ever been reading a book or watching a TV show or movie, or maybe watching a video essay on your favorite topic or hobby, and you think of the one you’re watching as a friend? I don’t mean they’re speaking to you or anything, but you know them so well, especially in the case of books, where you really get into their head. The extreme of this comes in the form of the Team Edward vs. Team Jacob thing a few years back. It’s all the young people who wanted to date Loki, despite the fact that he’s, you know, evil. And lest you think I’m making this a young girl problem, witness the “Not my Doctor” people, predominantly men, who seem to think that the Doctor is a person, not a work of pretend created by a series of writers going back sixty years. One thing that often happens with internet stars is that people leave them cruel, teasing comments that would appropriate for close friends ribbing each other at a coffee shop, but not with a perfect stranger, all because they feel that stranger would get the joke.
If you have felt a connection with a fictional character or online personality, you don’t have to admit it. It’s a common enough occurrence that I know that some of you reading it have gone through it, and it even has a name: parasocial relationships. Literally, it means one-way relationships because the one you’re connecting to can’t share that connection with you. Parasocial relationships are actually quite healthy (unless you’re going to extremes about it, like threatening an actor who plays a particularly despicable character). They develop strong senses of empathy, and those who have these relationships tend to be better friends overall. We spend as much time, if not more, with these made-up people than we do with most real people, so if you’re going to build up a connection at all, it makes sense to form one with this presence in your life.
So you’re wondering where I’m going to confess the weird thing. Have I fallen deeply in love with middle-aged Punky Brewster? Do I think that Addie Larue in the novel I’m reading is the only one who could really get me? Is there someone online I recently propositioned after watching all her videos? Not quite. You may not realize this, but I’m a writer (I know! Shock! It’s almost as if it’s not, like, the only thing I ever talk about!), and as a writer, I create characters. You see where I’m going with this. It takes me about two months to write a novel, and in that two months, I live with these characters. I think about them when I wake up in the morning, when I’m cooking, cleaning, going on long walks, and when I go to bed at night. I infuse them with the traits of people I know and of myself, and I see the world from their point of view, finding the good in anything they do (even the bad guys because nobody sees themselves as the bad guys). For two months, these guys are my life, and then they’re gone. This wasn’t as much of a problem when I was writing a series because I could always return to them. When I wrote the On the Hedge series, I wrote them one after another, for almost a year and a half (those books are much longer than anything I have written since, so they took closer to three, three-and-a-half months a piece to write), and I never had to leave the characters behind. But now that I’m writing one-and-done novels predominantly, they’re gone for good.
It’s weird how much I love these guys because they’re not real. I have made them up. They don’t do anything I don’t tell them to do (even if I do go with the flow and try to let the story tell itself). I should not think of them as real people. Even as friends, they’re a camp friend at the most, one who doesn’t write you after they go home. But I still miss them and even mourn them a little when they’re gone. I wonder if this can even be classified as a parasocial relationship because these lives belong entirely to my whim.
I don’t know if I’m the only writer who feels this way. I can’t be. In a world where I can’t see my friends, these are the relationships I can turn to. I don’t know if this makes me maladjusted or just plain sad, but it’s my life right now. I just finished a novel, and I’m kind of bummed out. Let’s see who I meet with the next one.
Jeremiah Murphy 