I’m waiting for my main character to show up like a street dog

Where I live, there is something informally known as the cat / dog distribution system. If you think you might like a pet, you don’t ask if anyone is adopting or contact any pet stores or breeders. You simply tell the universe you’re ready for your pet and soon enough, one will show up at your door. Probably with fleas. Or it will pop out of nowhere, accompany for your hike, and then follow you down the mountain and never leave your side again, which happened to my friend. Sometimes you absolutely, positively insist that you cannot take on a dog and some stinky thing appears on your doorstep and looks at you with those chocolate-pool eyes. Six months down the line they’re your best friend.

My dog showed up in a similar way. Anyone here with cats will tell you they just showed up one day, they found them behind a bin, or they snatched the cats up out of the clutches of an irresponsible owner who let the cat get so sick it had worms coming out its butthole. It’s not very glamorous. I never said it was. We don’t look for pedigrees or whatever. We just wait for whatever mutt shows up and decide that must be our life companion.

I am of course romanticising a very real overpopulation problem which is lack of animals that are spayed an neutered, and a crisis where there are way too many pets and not enough good homes. I am not saying it should be this way, I am just saying majority of my friends found their pets this way.

For the better part of last year I spent a lot of time writing a book. But something was missing. And recently while seeing a clip of an author talking about a character of hers, I realized the problem. She said, her female lead character came into her head fully formed. And most of her writing the book was just following the lead character around and letting her have free reign of whatever needed to happen. She said she couldn’t control her even if she wanted to.

I’ve heard this before, in one of my most beloved childhood book series. The author was in the train one day, and the character’s came to her fully formed. And as much as I loved writing this book I was playing with for a year, as much as I loved waking up before my partner and son in the mornings, making my coffee, and diving into this world, I didn’t have this experience. I knew in this book I was writing, the lead character was me, just with a different name. I knew I was writing down things like, the main male character has brown hair, this colour eyes, and I think this is a cool name.

But when I think about books that truly moved me, that grabbed me by the throat and didn’t let go… that felt like a world I didn’t want to leave, the characters had that quality. Like they were real, like they showed up one day and found a poor schlep of a writer and harassed them until the writer agreed to tell that story or be haunted for the rest of their lives. I want that. I don’t want to sit down and imagine my characters, to pull at character traits and names from Pinterest. I want them to explode in my life as a feeling, refusing to let go.

I’m not saying it all has to land perfectly in my lap, of course it will be work. But when my female lead character arrives she needs to be real.

Kind of like the dog or cat distribution system. I want her to show up at my front door, twigs in her hair and mud on her face, slamming on the door with her fists and saying let me the fuck in. I want to let her in, half terrified, half curious. I want her to take a glug from my half-drank tea and say, lady, do I have a story for you. Or maybe she’d rather die before drinking from someone else’s cup. Maybe I have to call her in from behind the tree across the road. Whoever she is, I’m ready for her.

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