When I was writing, for years, about my character Helen---I was writing stories of Helen for a decade or more---she became very real to me. It seems that this happened also to Lucy Montgomery, who wrote the Anne of Green Gables books. She said, in her diaries, that even later in life, it was as if, if she turned her head suddenly, she would see Anne, just at her shoulder, with her all the time.
Obviously (or, perhaps not so obviously,) Ms. Montgomery's relationship to Anne is somewhat different from that between me and Helen, but similar enough that I understand how Ms. Montgomery feels. It's even more true in the case of Jane, another OC* of mine. I loved Jane dearly, and I feel terrible about finishing the book Jane in such a lame manner; but the sisters Gillian and Angela, who figure in the Jane story--- lovely women though they are--- were constraining me too much. Another is Maia, the central character of Prisoner. Just thinking about these women makes me feel so sentimental!
I don't remember the exact principle of the Pinocchio story, about how he becomes a real boy; the morality in that fable is, at least on the surface, outmoded and trite. Possibly, though, we can extract something a little more relevant to modern life and society from Mr. Collodi's story, where good and evil would be defined much more elastically.
Kay
*OC = 'original character.'
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