Cultivating Character Crushes
On the benefits of fiercely admiring your characters from afar...
In my early days of getting sober, summer of 2020, I stumbled upon a book called The Sober Lush: A Hedonist's Guide to Living a Decadent, Adventurous, Soulful Life—Alcohol Free, and as these things go, the book was exactly what I needed, to the point that I reread it at least a dozen times over the course of that year. It was different from other sobriety books in that it focused not on the (necessary) gut-pummeling, heart-breaking, often rage-laced and exhausting process of getting sober, but on the equally necessary aspect of how to be sober and fun.
If you start drinking regularly at an early age, something you (might) realize when you stop drinking is that you never learned how to have FUN as an adult without booze as the primary catalyst. I fall into this category, and for a while, I was at a loss as to how to fix it. (Another aspect of this issue was related to the fact that the two things I’d long considered my preferred hobbies—reading and writing—had turned into paying work, and while I won’t complain that I’m able to bring in money doing things I love, it certainly changed my relationship to the activities I once chose to do for fun. But that’s another post.) I had a few glimmers of what sobriety could look like, based on the one summer I spent sober in my young adulthood, but beyond those (difficult, happy) memories, I struggled to regain some sense of joyousness and indulgence in my day-to-day sober life.
At any rate, I was pleased to find a chapter called “Crush” in The Sober Lush, and I returned to it often, remembering the myriad crushes of my youth: massive crushes, little crushes, public crushes, private crushes, celebrity crushes, fleeting crushes and longstanding crushes. These days, I’m a happily married, monogamous woman, and I am relieved to find room once again for crushes. (They’re so much fun when they’re just for fun!)
So, what does this have to do with writing?
Recently, in my return to writing fiction, I’ve struggled with how to stay with a piece long enough to finish a first draft. I think there are a few reasons for this—reasons many writers will relate to, among them being burnt out and being afraid to make a mess—and then there’s one I only recently articulated to myself: I am a writer who must have a crush on her characters in order to be invested enough to write about them.
It’s pretty easy, when writing nonfiction, especially nonfiction about an extramarital affair or the defining summer romance of my youth, to have crushes on my characters. After all, I once loved them! (In many ways, I continue to love them, though at a careful remove. A crush on an old flame is a great way to memorialize.) But when it comes to writing fiction? It can be harder to elicit that gorgeous, churning, all-consuming crush feel. Fictitious characters are so much a figment of our own imagination, that it can be a challenge to “know” them deeply while also cultivating the sense of elusion necessary for sustained interest.
Ever since I had this revelation, I’ve been thinking a lot about crushes. What they mean, what need they fill. A crush isn’t love—it can’t be, not in its truest form anyway—because it depends on the special mixture of intrigue, admiration, curiosity that brews at a distance, from a place of not-knowing. Sometimes crushes are closer to us than others: we can have crushes on friends as easily as we can have crushes on celebrities. Either way, a crush requires unrequitedness, a sense of impossibility. (Once a crush moves into the realm of possibilitity it loses some of its essential mystery and becomes… a romance. Equally exciting, but totally different.) Crushes can be dangerous, they can be obsessive, they can hurt; crushes can be lighthearted, lovely, full of wonder. Either way, when you have a crush, it’s time-consuming, and in its best manifestation, that time feels beyond well spent.
How, though, does one develop a crush on one’s fictional characters? (Is it even necessary? Maybe not for every writer, but I will say it’s always obvious to me when a writer holds their characters in high regard: it’s one of the reasons why I adore Christine Sneed’s story collections so much; other writers whose devotion to their characters emanates from the page include Victor LaValle, Mia Alvar, Jhumpa Lahiri, Julie Buntin, and Neil Gaiman. You’re welcome to add to this list in the comments below if you feel so inspired.)
Here are three possibilities I recommend for cultivating real crushes on your fictional characters:
Keep some distance, but not so much distance that you lose sight. Unlike a romance, a crush actually depends on slight remove. There’s this little (or big) patch of space between you and the desired one. That space is FERTILE territory. Yes, as a writer, you want to know a lot about your characters: you want them to be magnificently complex and almost three-dimensional. Counterintuitively, leaving gaps for mysteriousness helps create this dimensionality. Think of how watching someone from the corner of your eye reveals nuance you won’t see head on. We quite literally see the world differently when we use our peripheral vision. But more importantly, people (and by extension, our characters) behave differently when they don’t know they’re being watched. So, give your characters a little space, but don’t turn your back. See what happens when they think no one is looking.
Snoop on your characters. Research them in whatever ways you can. Catch them in unexpected situations. In some situations, we call this stalking (LOL). But it’s an essential part of accessing the complexity of your character/crush. Ask yourself what you might discover on your characters’ social media pages. Read the books your characters are reading; go see a concert your character would attend. Is your character/crush from New Mexico? Get a map and take a look at that geography. Does your character/crush ski on the weekends? Guess what lessons you’re signing up for this Saturday… (Or at the very least, master how to make the world’s best hot chocolate to enhance that apres ski moment.) It helps if your character/crush’s interests overlap with your own, but it’s totally okay if they don’t. Maybe it’s even better that way: getting out there and seeing the world through new experiences and new knowledge is one of the very best parts of cultivating a crush.
Talk about your characters to anyone who will listen. Not every person likes to talk about their crushes, and not every writer likes to talk about their characters. But I find that if you’ve got a safe and willing audience, gushing about a character/crush is incredibly illuminating. Articulation on the finer points of what draws you to someone (fictitious or otherwise) adds new layers to understanding. AND, you never know what kind of juicy insight another might offer into the mysterious world of this most beneficial crush.
A few of my favorite recent posts from around the Substack universe:
“More Ideas from the Garden” by
: My favorite among these beautiful “tending to a garden” metaphors for creativity is “5. Sleep, Creep, Leap.” It points to the necessary cycles of growth, and how to embody them. No plant grows all the time! No creative person is output-only. We need fallow periods of deep rest, we need the zing of fertilizer, we need mild adversity; many days we are slow, and then ⋙BLOOM⋘ we are fast.Voice [1], Voice [2], and Voice [3] from
: This series on Voice in Fiction is a wonderful resource covering what voice is, and where to find it. Expect to be delighted by the reading recommendations in each post.“The Audacity of Telling People What To Do” by
: I love Bay’s self-created rules for how to show up to any event or post she does. The whole idea resonates with the list of requirements I like to check off before I release creative work into the world: Is it mysterious, is it humble, is it wise, is it generous? (And, I wonder, what are your rules for showing up?)
Thanks for the shout out--I shouted you out in a note this morning. I've said it before, but your writing is always smart and fluid and personal in the best way.
And: Give me the poop on affiliation with Bookshop.org. That sounds like a thing I should be doing.
I get a lot of ebooks from the Seattle Public Library [read the Kindle under the covers at night], and I like the flexibility of schlepping the Kindle on the bus and so on. I don't buy enough paper books--partly because I'm in the business of giving most of my books away (before somebody else has to unload them) . . . I used to bring tubfuls to the residencies, but since then I've put out a FB call for people who want five books for the cost of media mail. That was good, but it's too much work prepping them for the P.O. I think I'm gonna load up a box and drive around Tacoma slipping them into the little libraries. The books I order I try to get from Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, for the sake of supporting them.
Honored for the shout out!! Your creative rules (maybe there’s a more fun word than rules here) are SO GOOD. Mysterious. Humble. Wise. Generous. Keeping these near ❤️