Apparently My Fictional Author Needs Me to Write Her Books

I have fifteen unfinished manuscripts.

We’ve discussed this.

More specifically, I’ve already written here about the spectacularly questionable decision to respond to fifteen unfinished manuscripts by having an idea for a novel about an unfinished manuscript.

That idea became a trilogy.

Fifteen became eighteen.

If you’ve been reading the Margins, you already know some of that. You may even know more than I’ve technically told you.

The margins have a habit of doing that.

I remain aware of the irony.

What I did not anticipate was Lore Lassen.

But to explain Lore, I have to go backward considerably farther than Lore.

I’ve been fascinated by literary history for as long as I can remember. Not simply by books, but by what happened around them.

Who wrote anonymously.

Who used another name.

Who wasn’t particularly famous until after death.

Who left work unfinished.

Who wanted something destroyed.

Who ignored someone else’s request to destroy it.

Who edited whom.

Who rearranged what.

Which manuscript survived.

Which didn’t.

Which version became the version the rest of us inherited.

And especially all the places where another person’s hand entered the story.

Those things have been swirling around in my brain for decades. They’ve already found their way, directly and indirectly, into the novels I’ve been writing. Sometimes deliberately. Sometimes I don’t realize where something came from until I’m halfway down another research hole and recognize the bones of an idea I’ve been carrying around for years.

Lore didn’t create that fascination.

She gave me an excuse to go much, much deeper.

Because Lore couldn’t simply be a fictional author with an unfinished manuscript.

She needed a literary life.

I needed to know what she had read. What she underlined. What irritated her. What sent her looking for something else. Which writers she returned to. Which pieces of literary history got lodged in her brain and eventually emerged as something entirely different in her fiction.

And because this is apparently the sort of completely reasonable thing I do now, I also needed to build Lore’s lore.

Her notes.

Her photographs.

Her marginalia.

Her research.

Her journal.

Her cryptogram.

The cipher threaded through it.

The books and writers that would teach a reader how to follow it without ever sitting them down and saying, Here is how you solve this.

I wasn’t researching literary history for Lore.

I was taking something I’ve loved for decades and asking:

What would Lore notice in it?

That’s how I ended up back with Emily Dickinson.

Mary Shelley.

Sylvia Plath.

Emily and Charlotte Brontë.

Agatha Christie.

Daphne du Maurier.

Not because Lore was going to write novels about them.

Because I wanted to know what might have caught in her mind.

Dickinson and the strange territory between Nobody and Somebody.

Shelley and what happens when a creation stops behaving like something its creator controls.

Plath and the fact that changing the order of the same pieces can change the thing they become.

Emily Brontë’s ink and Charlotte’s pencil sharing the same page.

Christie disappearing under another woman’s name.

Du Maurier giving Rebecca a name powerful enough to consume an entire novel while never giving her living narrator one of her own.

Those were supposed to be the things beside Lore’s stories.

The literary sediment underneath them.

Then I made a mistake.

I asked what books those ideas might have inspired Lore to write.

Now she has five.

Not five titles.

Five actual premises.

There is an unidentified murdered woman who becomes famous after death while the entire country invents versions of who she was, even though nobody knows her name.

There is a woman who creates a male author and discovers the world may believe in him more completely than it believes in her.

There is a box belonging to a dead woman who has the recipient’s face, leading her to discover a twin sister she never knew existed, except the evidence inside can be arranged to prove entirely different things happened to her.

There are a dead grandmother’s journals filled with pencil corrections that can be proven to have existed before the events they describe.

There is a hotel where everyone recognizes a woman and calls her by the wrong name.

These were supposed to make Lore believable.

They were supposed to be the books she had already written before we found the manuscript at the center of the trilogy.

I was building her past.

Then, this week, I built her a website.

Because apparently the fictional author with five fictional published novels and an unfinished fictional manuscript needed an author platform.

So now Lore Lassen has an author bio.

She has childhood photographs.

She has a German mother who told her fairy tales and an American military father who moved the family around Europe until he retired.

She has a hometown called Elsewhere, North Carolina.

She has a master’s degree in folklore.

She is a violinist.

She is a photographer.

She has book covers.

She has publicity photographs.

She has a movie adaptation.

She has an author notebook called Lore, Etc.

She has Letters From Elsewhere.

She has a rabbit.

She has a rabbit hole.

She has, at this point, a more coherent author brand than some actual authors.

I would like to remind everyone that this woman does not exist.

Except now she sort of does.

Not in the way that requires psychiatric intervention.

In the considerably more inconvenient way that requires web hosting.

And somewhere between choosing her photographs, writing her biography, building the history of her five novels, and deciding what she would put in the margins of her own notebook, I had a deeply inconvenient thought.

I want to write them.

Especially A Woman of Some Renown.

I want to know who that unidentified woman was.

Which is ridiculous.

I made her up.

I could simply decide.

Apparently that is not how this works.

So, for anyone keeping score:

I started with fifteen unfinished manuscripts.

One unfinished manuscript became a trilogy, which took me to eighteen.

Now my fictional author has five supposedly finished novels that I am considering writing, which could take me to twenty-three.

Twenty-three.

I am writing a trilogy concerned, among other things, with what happens when people refuse to leave an author’s work alone.

And I am apparently incapable of leaving my fictional author’s work alone.

There is probably a lesson in there.

There may also be a clue.

I’m not particularly interested in clarifying which.

N.B.