Nights In White Satin

Have you ever fallen in love with one of your own characters?

 Over-active imagination, I’d once been told. Since then there were other words for it. They sounded more scientific but they were still wrong, still a label, still a box. The word came with solutions, of course none of them stuck, and ‘cures’. They expected me to be able to rid myself of the monsters that lurked in my head. But maybe the monsters were outside of it.

It was hard to understand. Of course it was, hard to understand the onslaught of excuses that my parents told people as I screamed in the street at the people that didn’t have eyes. Or the teachers that tried to understand why I was writing down notes of things that people hadn’t said. It wasn’t ‘normal’ it wasn’t right.

They still laughed at me, still called me names in the street. No matter how many red cards and detentions the kids got for bullying me it never stopped them. In all honesty, I think they realised that even the adults thought I was different. Trapped in my own little world. They didn’t understand that I wasn’t trapped in the worlds I created, they were trapped in a world they didn’t.

I started writing when I was about ten. My first story wasn’t about anything but myself. It was about me travelling through my imagination with my friends. I didn’t create the story. I just went on the adventure, my hands automatically recording down the world that I saw and the way the plot unfolded. I didn’t have a way of publishing the stories back then. I was too young to have freedom on the internet. And even if I did I was too young to understand the potential that my writing would have. So the story sat on my desk, mostly written on scrap paper with bank drafts and sales representations becoming my canvas, and gathered dust.

It was years later I found the internet and created my blog and tried to connect with more than just the people inside my own head. The people online didn’t need to know that the stories I wrote weren’t just stories to me. They wouldn’t understand even if I did tell them.

I tried other creative projects, like film making and script writing. But I always lost interest very quickly. Always defaulting back to the stories that I could create without a pen and paper. That I didn’t have to think about.

My first novel, the one I’m currently writing was called ‘Nights In White Satin.’ It was so named as when I started it I was listening to that song. I would probably change the story later on. But for now the story remained with that name.

This story didn’t feature me, or any of my friends. It was a story of another girl, her hair hung down her shoulder like it was positioned there. Her amber eyes were always smiling. It felt like she was smiling at me. As I wrote her out on the pages I slowly fell in love with this character that I had created. I wrote into her everything that I wanted. And I wrote out everything that I didn’t. I could picture her, my Sara, everywhere. She followed me around and since being my creation she had joined the voices. I could hear hers louder than the others. The melodic song of speech that she sang every time she spoke. I listened to what she said. It wasn’t hard to ignore her during the day. But at night I’d stay up for hours talking to her, laughing, living, loving. She was a writer as well. Although she wrote poems and plays, she loved the complexity of them. Her favourite saying was simply beautiful:

“It is in complexity that meaning occurs.” The poetry of the line astounded me. And I spent my time trying to come up with something just as complexly simple to reply with. But I never could, it was like I was destined to write normally. Destined to write how I saw things. My world was as simplistic as my writing. I added adjectives and complex phrases, but it only sounded intelligent, comfortable. It was a thing of logic and reason and thought. Her complexity was simply a thing of beauty. Her laugh was bright and smiling and she explored her local town every day. Trying to find hidden meaning and complex messages behind everything. Her town, another fictional place, was beautiful. The green grass that coated all surfaces left no place for tarmac or pavement and everyone wore sandals as the sun was so bright that you couldn’t stand in the light at noon as it was too hot for everyone. She loved her world, and as I wrote more detail into my novel I found myself asking her for directions to understand what she would do in the situations the story put her in. I was proud of the progress she was making but I was always aware that no matter what choices she made; she was always going to die alone.

Author's Note

Yes this has similarities to Mental Illnesses but it is never defined as one. If you have a Mental Illness similar to this and you find this offensive please message me and i will remove the story, i do not want to offend anyone.

Reviews

[Zelda Morgan]

I love the way you made the connection between the song and the story, I often do that myself and it's what made me click on it. I'm really glad I did because I'm currently working on a story about getting lost in the imaginary world and it's been a personal semi-problem of mine for as long as I can remember. It's nice to hear someone else's perspective on it, especially when it's well written.