But they can. 

And by "they," I mean the characters.

I was reading something for a school assIgnment and I stumbled across this passage. It's the words of one of the authors responsible for writing about the "Writing Life" and while it's an assignment where I'm supposed to be reflecting on who I am as a writer in the context of a literary essay and/or analysis, I couldn't help but feel drawn to the passage, especially after what happened during Calculus today.

I was writing, you see, something fun. I have a notebook for plot that strikes me at random intervals, but  recently, the pages have been left blank and almost as pale as my ginger friend. I just haven't had ideas, not ones that I want to write down anyways. Most of my time has been spent in a vicious, never ending cycle of catching up on things. Work, assignments, practice, friends, family, laundry (oof, that's been rough... I was running out of comfortable pajamas and falling asleep in my jeans and blouses, waking up with funky stitching patterns down my legs and one arm.) and just about anything else you can think of. 

I just picked up in an old plot bunny I'd actually been writing out. Not so much the story itself, but my thought process (as much as the subject of the first sentence is entirely different than the ending of the page, I actually have a fairly linear thought process once I map it all out. I'm just as scatterbrained on paper as I am verbally, or when I try to follow my own bizzare and pogo-stick-like thought process and end up getting distracted and trying to remember just what I'd been thinking about to begin with. Maybe my brain fills in the gaps the same way it corrects my mistakes in writing to what I meant rather than what's on the page, so I don't notice unless I read it aloud, or someone points it out to me) and little snippers of "story-telling" so to speak, prospects. 

Before I knew what had happened, I'd both been answering questions asked by my teacher, and written four pages in my composition notebook, come up with an ending, and a subtle twist in the story hidden in the language of one of the characters. Just as the bell rang, I'd already swung my backpack over my shoulder and left, listening to the bickering and biting remarks between the multiple characters, mapping out the dialogue and sub-stories (kinds of fluff, I'd call them) that I knew I'd never write down. The same situations played over and over on the pages as I read them several times to try and put the ideas I wanted into ink without veering too far off track where I'd originally came from. Multiple ideas, conversations, or even exchanges of dialogue had suggested themselves, and although I hadn't settled on any, I left for home, and took about an hour-long nap. 

So, while I hadn't finished anything substantial, or even made a dent in the pile of work I knew I had to do, some sort of accomplishment had settled over me, "Yeah," I seemed to say to myself, "I can do this. I can make this work," and already my pen began dancing again. Time to create, even if it isn't the final product, something you can bring yourself to love, or even fostered into a fully developed piece of work. Having something bouncing around that head of mine sparks all kinds of fires, and I get to choose which to feed and foster. 

(This is the passage which reminded me of all this:)

"Love your material. Nothing frightens the inner critic more than the writer who loves her work. The writer who is enamored of her material forgets all about censoring herself. She doesn't stop to wonder if her book is any good, or who will publish it, or what people will think. She writes in a trance, losing track of time, hearing only her characters in her head.

This is a state of grace possible only when you are truly desperate to tell a story. Suddenly you are so full of voices, ideas and events that it is as if you were rushing from the scene of the crime. How you arrange your sentences or whether a similar tale has been told before: these could not be farther from your mind. It never occurs to you to question whether your characters are well drawn or whether their dialogue is realistic because all these people are pushing and shoving and talking at once, and to your mind they are real, so realism is not much of a problem.

There is nothing better than listening to your characters regale you."

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/12/arts/writers-on-writing-ok-you-re-not-shakespeare-now-get-back-to-work.html