Limits of My Imagaination

Characters always live in my childhood houses.

This does not only apply to my own characters. Any account of a parent putting a child to bed appears to me in the room I grew up in from the time I was one-and-a-half years old until I was 11. It is  a room with a shared dresser on one wall,  a sliding closet door, bookshelf, and the door to the room on  another, and  each of the  the two other walls, parallel to each other has a bed. My wall is where the window is. My sister’s bed has a mirror hanging on top. My sisters bed is just in front of the door. If we sit on her bed with the door open we can look down the hall and see the living room television at the far end of the split-level ranch’s maroon-carpeted hallway.

Interestingly, if there is only one child in the scene, I imagine him or her in what would be my sister’s bed; I guess that’s because that was the scene I could see from my bed.

Any teenager lives in the room I moved into when I was 11, one with sloping ceilings, and the dresser that used to be shared. This room is less set; I’m less likely to imagine a boy in it. And, married couples always share a room that looks almost exactly like my parents’ room in that second house, the one we  moved to when I was 11.

If an author gives a description of a room, I can remove the characters from my house, otherwise the tendency is so ingrained that I don’t even recognoze the images evoked by the narrative as the images in my memory.

But it’s more of a problem when I am writing. I need to push to move my characters to homes that look different than the ones I’ve lived in, especially if they are families. I find myself thinking “well that couldn’t happen, because the guest room is too close to the master bedroom” instead of thinking “what if they lived in a house where the guest room was further from the master bedroom? Or in a house where the shower in the master bedroom worked and so the parents didn’t have to share a bathroom with the teenager who lives on the second floor (that would be my youngest sister)?”

It’s time to let my characters design their own homes.

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