Long before most of us write a story, we invent a character. It has a name, a personality, a backstory that changes daily, and firm opinions about bedtime. Nobody calls it fiction. We call it an imaginary friend, and its author, usually about four years old, gets no credit at all.
It may be the most common creative act there is. Some of these characters are invisible, like a dragon who lives behind the radiator. But plenty move into something already lying around the house: a particular bear, a stuffed rabbit, or a doll with one eye who has clearly seen things.
It’s a surprisingly sophisticated editorial decision. An invisible friend lives only in your head. Give a character a body, though, and it starts to take on a life of its own. And sometimes, it refuses to give the body back.
Something to Write To
Children seem to know this instinctively. In a 2004 study by psychologists Marjorie Taylor and Stephanie Carlson, about two-thirds of children had an imaginary companion by age seven. Among preschoolers, roughly half of those companions were based on a toy.It makes sense. A toy gives you something to write to. Its face never changes, which means it can say almost anything. A stitched smile reads as encouragement one day and smugness the next. A slumped rag doll looks exhausted, unimpressed, or deeply sorry about breaking the lamp, depending on the afternoon.
Some children grow up and turn this into a career. When Taylor and her colleagues interviewed 50 fiction writers, two in five remembered having an imaginary companion, and 92 percent said their characters sometimes seemed to act on their own. Even without a body, a character can get loose. One writer explained that her characters usually stayed in her room, in her computer. But one seemed to live in the house, and her husband had noticed: “The one who drank all the milk is your character; he went to the refrigerator at night!”
Which is, more or less, exactly what a four-year-old would say. The difference is that the four-year-old can point to the culprit.
Typecasting
Like any author, a child decides who their character is going to be, and the casting is rarely accidental. Christopher Robin cast himself as the capable one. His bear was a Bear of Very Little Brain, the kind who spends a whole morning tracking a fearsome Woozle around a clump of trees, growing more alarmed as the footprints multiply, until Christopher Robin points out from a branch above that they’re Pooh’s own footprints. Somebody had to be in charge, and it was clearly not going to be the bear.Calvin went the other way. Hobbes is taller, quicker, and braver, and he has a much better grasp of consequences. When Calvin barrels into his latest scheme, Hobbes offers a dry warning or two, then climbs into the wagon anyway.
Either way, the child is trying on a point of view that isn’t quite theirs yet: the one who’s in charge, or the one who knows better. And sometimes the one who knows better is a rag doll whose expression suggests he’s heard this one before.
The Consequences of Being Real
A character with a body also has something to lose. In The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams’s 1922 story, the wise old Skin Horse explains that by the time a toy becomes Real, most of its hair has been loved off. Realness, in other words, shows up as wear, which any rag doll who has been on enough adventures could tell you.A body can also go missing. The original Roo, one of Christopher Robin Milne’s real toys, was lost in a Sussex apple orchard sometime in the 1930s. The rest of the Milne toys have done better. Winnie-the-Pooh just turned 100, and the bear himself, along with Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, and Tigger, has lived in a glass case at the New York Public Library since 1987. Britain would like them back, and it has been asking, at steadily escalating levels of government, for nearly 30 years.
In 1998, a member of Parliament compared the toys to the Elgin Marbles and called for their return (with seemingly no irony). A couple of years ago, an envoy went to New York on Queen Camilla’s behalf to invite Pooh to Buckingham Palace. The library declined to let him go. When the Queen visited in April, she left the bear where he was and brought a replica Roo instead to complete the library’s collection.
That’s a lot of diplomacy for a teddy bear. But then no one is really fighting over an old stuffed bear. They’re fighting over a character come to life, and Pooh only has the one body.
The Doll Gets the Name
The character usually wins the billing, too. A. A. Milne’s two books of Pooh stories are called Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. The boy who owned the bear appears in both, mostly in a supporting role. Give a character a body and a life of its own, and sooner or later it takes over the story.Finding Frank and His Friend, the first project we made at Curio & Co., simply starts from there. The doll is Frank. The four-year-old who invented him is “his Friend.”
Frank never moves and never speaks. His opinions come entirely through his face: the slump, the sideways glance, the knowing look at the reader just as the plan starts to go wrong. The Friend is a dreamer who charges in without a fully formed plan. Frank is the one who remembers how the last adventure went. But Frank’s doubts have to come from somewhere, and there’s only one person doing the imagining. That caution is really the Friend’s own, a small voice the Friend isn’t ready to listen to yet, so he’s handed it to someone else to hold.
That may be why grown-ups keep writing these stories. You get to be both: the kid who charges in, and the doll who knows how it ends. We enjoyed it enough to give Frank a whole history, complete with a cartoonist who never existed, Clarence ‘Otis’ Dooley, and a box of his “lost” drawings. If a character insists on taking on a life of its own, it might as well have a past.
