The Secret of My Celeste

File this one under typical writer insanity...

A year ago, I was supposed to be in Florida meeting my dream woman - Celeste - the golf instructor. For those of you who remember, Celeste was a creation of mine from a series of blogs where I tried to imagine those ten days that I would spend in Florida last year. According to my imagination, I met Celeste at a golf lesson and we ended up going out for a few nights while I was in Florida. Of course, she wasn't real - in the sense that she didn't really exist, couldn't be actually touched, and certainly didn't have real lips to kiss me. But the imagination is a powerful thing according to Mickey Mouse and his trip Fantasmic.

For a writer to imagine a new character is nothing new. We do it so often and so routinely that it just becomes something rather boring - ordinary - commonplace. We are not really breathing life into a character, we are merely forming the outline, the structure, the accepted parameters of a pretend individual (like a forger might provide the documents for an alias). It is YOUR imagination that breathes life into a character. Without someone reading about the character, there can be no life given to this character. Its your imagination that gives a character its voice, its shape, its look, its spark of vitality. So the secret to the success of a writer's characters is mostly based on the writer's ability to stimulate that part of your brain that makes you breathe life into the writer's creation. Its a symbiotic relationship, and writers are often surprised what direction their characters take once life has been breathed into them by readers.

But Celeste is different. Celeste follows in a long line of different characters for me. To me, Celeste was alive. Is alive. Will be alive again. She is a tapping into a subconscious for me. She is a character that I found breathing and described to you and not the other way around.

Its a subtle psychological difference and its something that I've only noticed when I try to imagine female characters in love stories. To me, Celeste is closer akin to a fantasy than a character. She is what I'd Like To Have Happen To Me, and not some randomly generated plot driving floozy. The difference is quite stunning in terms of writing. Characters I control. They do what I tell them to do. They say their lines. And they die on cue. Girls like Celeste tell me what they're doing, even when it complicates the story line. They make me realize that I am lucky to have them. And that if it weren't for some trick of writing fate, I'd probably never even know them.

Let's be realistic - most great literary women are Celeste's. There's no way that Romeo meets Juliet and they immediately fall in love. There's no way that Juliet defies her parents and secretly marries Romeo. There's no way that Juliet agrees to fake her death because she loves Romeo so much that she's willing to do anything to be with him. And there's no way that Juliet kills herself when fate intervenes. These things don't happen to real people. These things don't happen to normal characters. They only happen to women of Celeste's ilk - creations of pure love - who show us not what the world actually presents, but what we'd LIKE TO HAVE HAPPEN TO US. Secretly, we'd all like to have a love that strong that we'd be willing to die for each other. Celeste, Juliet, Henriette, all of these women speak to our inner souls, our innermost desires, our Christian selfs. They remind us of the divine part of our nature. They remind us of what is true and noble and wonderful about life and love.

The secret of my Celeste is that she is that part of me that longs for the ultimate love of God. And she will not allow me to take any cheap substitutes.