What happens when we really listen to fictional characters?
Craig Chalquist
9/1/25
J. R. R. Tolkien was grading student papers one day at Oxford when a voice inside him said, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."
What was a hobbit? He began writing on a blank page to find out. The Elves whispered to him as he wrote.
This sort of thing is not unusual. In 2014, and again in 2018, John Foxwell, a postdoc attending the Edinburgh International Book Festival, asked fiction authors if they ever listened to their characters. Roughly 63% said they did, and 61% said their characters have their own agency.
Tolkien was surprised when Faramir walked into the story one day. Who was he? "I did not invent Earthsea," Ursula K. LeGuin stated, "I discovered it." Alice Walker, Robert E. Howard, Philip Pullman, and many other authors report having internal conversations with their characters and even being guided by them.
The usual (reductive) explanation is that the creative mind is also highly dissociable, and that speaking with our characters is a game we play with ourselves. Perhaps. But as a writer who also teaches depth psychology, I prefer C. G. Jung's detailed descriptions of what such conversations are actually like.
In 1913, Jung decided to let his unconscious mind speak to him, and he would write down what it said. For this he used "active imagination": he allowed himself to wade into daydreamy states and waited for something to happen.
Soon after he started doing this, two characters appeared, both of a mythic background: Philemon, a wise old man, and Salome, a seductive biblical figure. Deep in reverie, Jung was so surprised by their aliveness that he tried to control the encounter by interpreting them psychologically—whereupon Philemon stated: We are real and not just images.
Jung soon encountered other inner figures willing to challenge and disagree with him. His Black Book journals (of which his artistically elaborated Red Book is an excerpt) cover nineteen years of imaginal encounters. Many were unpleasant, and some were bruising. All taught him not only about himself, but about his work, his relationships, and the world he lived in.
There are things in the psyche, he concluded, that the conscious mind does not produce. They produce themselves and should be engaged with.
Such imaginal figures often insist on their own kind of autonomy. They show up in dreams, fantasies, mythologies, and altered states of consciousness. In the tradition of Islamic mysticism, they emanate from the Alam al-Mithal, the World of Images long considered an actual if nonphysical realm. (Frank Herbet mentions this term in his Dune books.) Whatever their ultimate sources, these voices provoke, challenge, and instruct us to the degree we are willing to suspend our normal prejudices and listen.
While writing Soulmapper, my first novel, I often conversed in imagination with Lucas (as the protagonist named himself) while out on a morning walk. One day I told him I had enough material for a novelette, perhaps. He had wanted a novel; I had wanted a short story. The novelette was a compromise.
After I had walked for a bit, he said, "I have an entire secret life you know nothing about." And he showed me. Surprised, I went home and wrote about it. By the time I had finished, Soulmapper was a novel. (If you're curious, Lucas's secret life begins with Chapter 4.)
About a third of the way through the novel, set sixty or so years from now, an immigrant named Mariam Najjar got together with two women and founded Lamplight, a post-patriarchal religion, in New York City. It was an informal religion based not in belief or authority, but in care, imagination, and inspiring storytelling. Because I'm one of those "spiritual but not religious" people, I was quite surprised by its emergence. Yet Lamplight proved fertile on many levels. It also provided bold, celebratory, and creative opposition to authoritarianism.
In her 1974 essay "Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?", Ursula LeGuin noted our habitual disparagement of fantasy, fiction, and imagination. In part, this disparagement reflects a sexism that classifies these creative activities as feminine and therefore of less value. Our obsession with the bottom line also plays a part: What good is something if it doesn't make money? (Which is ironic given the colossal revenues from Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, etc.) Too, we tend to look down on imagination as childish.
But for LeGuin, imagination is central to our humanity. Its fantastic and fictional creations are not factual, but they are profoundly true. We sense this, so we fear imagination's threat to all that is shallow and false, trivial and phony. Imagination vaults walls, subverts dogmas, questions irrational authority. We are afraid of dragons because we are afraid of freedom.
And of empathy. It's often easier to scapegoat; but storytelling, as P. J. Manney points out in "Empathy in the Time of Technology," is key to empathy.
We also tend to overrate the value of belief. Everyone knows that fiction isn't for believing, that fantasy and dreams aren't measurably, tangibly real. In my fiction, however, the Dreamvale is a layer of being that coexists with the material world. Every fiction and fantasy, every whim and wonder, lives somewhere in that realm of magic. Dreamvalers think we are odd for believing we create them. If anything, we succeed in listening in now and then when they have something to say or to show us.
I was forced to listen early on. Growing up in a chaotic and violent family, I turned to fiction and fantasy to stay sane. When I felt scared, for example, which was most of the time, I would ask myself: What would Corwin of Amber do in a situation like this? What would Beowulf Shaeffer do? Sarah Connor? The Stainless Steel Rat?
Then an image or idea would surface as guidance. They saved me from many a beating. You can imagine how affirming it was when, as a college student, I came across Jung's take on all this. Those characters? Yes, they're real, with their own special kind of reality. We don't just make them up; in a sense, they make themselves up. They talk back.
Listen, and a sparkling blend of imaginal wisdom and noetic hope will filter into your life. Just ask the Elves.
Craig Chalquist, PhD, PhD, is a department chair, professor, and author of the Lamplighter Trilogy of hopeful speculative fiction novels. He also co-writes short stories with assistance from the characters. Visit his website at Chalquist.com.