Words, silences and the story

You can't actually write silences. All you can do is tell people there is one and hope they can find it for themselves. Even then, it won't last as long as the real silence would if it actually happened........unless they stop reading for all the time it says, which is unlikely. I suppose the actual silence in any story is the sound that comes after the sound of the book being closed. But even that isn't really a silence, unless no-one else is ever going to read it again. At precisely the time one person closes the book another may start reading it, so there is never really a silence in the story.

Thinking about it all that way, nobody ever really dies in a story either, unless no-one ever reads it again, because when one person reads the bit where the character dies, someone else is probably reading the bit before that, when they are still alive. They are immortal in a way, quite a bit like Adonis, continually getting killed and being brought back to life.

That makes it very complicated - they are both alive and dead at the same time, and probably doing completely different things too - they could be sleeping for one person, or eating, or weeping, or laughing or kissing or doing almost anything. I suppose it can't be a lot of fun being a character in a story - for a start, the author will probably make you do all sorts of things you didn't want to, if you had a choice, and then each reader makes you do it all again, and, unless the author makes it very obvious, will probably think of a different motivation for you to do it .....what's more, each reader will imagine how you look and sound - so you can never be certain what you look like - you wouldn't recognise yourself in the mirror, and wouldn't know your own voice if you spoke to yourself.

If you think about it too, what do characters do when no-one is reading about them ? Do they still exist ? Do they carry on with their lives until someone opens the book and makes them do what the author and reader expect ?
I'm beginning to think that my characters don't like me much - I've left them to their own devices a bit too much recently, maybe I need to get back to them and get the story sorted out, Eurydice does seem to have developed a life of her own, which is more than a bit odd, considering she's been dead for most of the story so far.....which she certainly won't thank me for.....next time I write, it will be the story again, and it will be very soon, I promise.