The Day a Character Wouldn't Stop Talking To Me
Was the moment I could no longer tell myself I was simply "making up stories"
I was sat at the dining room table replying to an email, when she started talking non-stop. Not out loud. In my head. This character from a flash fiction I'd written and had published over a year ago suddenly had urgent things to say, and she wasn't taking no for an answer.
I tried to ignore her. Carry on with what I was doing. But her voice grew more insistent until I couldn’t do anything else. I opened up a new document and started typing everything she was telling me. I wrote non-stop for twenty minutes. That was the moment I could no longer tell myself I was simply "making up stories."
The Evolution I Didn't See Coming
For years, I thought I was just a writer with a very vivid imagination. The first draft of my first novel poured out of me in what felt like inspired creativity — characters appearing fully formed, dialogue flowing naturally, scenes and storylines unfolding with minimal effort. I was proud of my storytelling abilities and knew I’d been right all along that fiction writing was what I was meant to do.
It wasn't until that book was published and I'd gained some distance from it, and I saw some of the themes that readers were spotting in it, that the truth hit me: the story had been helping me to process the abandonment issues I’d had all my life from my biological father's lifelong absence, my mother's conditional love and emotional abuse, the extended family that just walked away when I was thirteen. It was all there, worked through via characters who had somehow guided me to healing I didn't even know I needed.
But I told myself it was coincidence. Subconscious mind at work. Normal writer stuff.
By my second novel, I started noticing something different. I felt less in control of the story. Characters would surprise me, do many things I hadn't planned. More than they would do the ones I had planned. The sensation was a bit like being a passenger in my own creative process but it felt natural too, so I didn't really question it.
Then came the novella I published last year which I wrote the first draft of back in 2018. That one was completely channeled, though I didn't have words for it at the time. Every time I sat down to write, the entire story came through me as if I was more a conduit than a creator.
When Separate Worlds Collided
But nothing prepared me for what happened next.
I'd had two completely different flash fiction pieces published about a year apart — they were set in different locations, different decades, had different themes, were completely unconnected in my mind. Then one day, a character from the first story mentioned she knew a character in the second story. A few weeks later, the character from the other story came with the same message.
I just kind of shrugged and dismissed it. I often had people turning up in my head and talking to me. That’s what happens with fiction writers, right?
Except these characters kept coming back and insisting they had history together. They wanted to tell me about their shared past, their connection, the larger story I hadn't seen. It felt strange but also kind of inevitable. I don’t think I questioned it at the time. I felt a sense of wonder but also acceptance. But I didn’t do anything about it. I had other things going on. So they kept telling me with increasing frequency that they knew each other.
Then that day at the dining table happened — the day she wouldn't stop talking. Her name is Tara. She had a lot to say.
What Channeling Feels Like
When people ask me to describe the channeling experience, I struggle to explain. It's simultaneously me and not me. I'm fully present and aware, but I'm also clearly receiving information from somewhere else.
The characters don't arrive all at once. First comes a vague forming of how they look, where they are in time. Then the situation they're in starts forming in my head over weeks and months, building like a Polaroid photo slowly reveals itself. Eventually they start talking to me, and that's when I begin asking them questions. But with Tara and Daisy (the character she knew from the other story) I had been ignoring them for so long that I only found out where they were and what was happening for them when Tara decided she’d be ignored no longer.
When I'm deep in the process, it feels like being both a conduit and a reporter. I'm the channel through which they speak, but I'm also the witness documenting what comes through. My fingers move across the keyboard, but the words feel like they're coming from "out there" somewhere.
The most profound realisation for me in all of this is that they exist independently of my imagination. These aren't characters I'm creating — they're beings I'm accessing, each with their own consciousness, their own stories, their own reasons for wanting to share their experiences through me.
The Teaching Keeps Coming
What took me years to understand is that every character who comes through is here to teach me something. The lessons aren't always obvious and usually I don't recognise what they've shown me until months or even years later, after I've gained the distance to see the patterns.
My first novel taught me that my parents' abandonment of me was about their limitations, not my worth. Characters from the novels and short fiction I’ve written have guided me through understanding forgiveness, processing grief, recognising my own patterns of self-protection and self-destruction. Each story becomes a medicine I didn’t know I needed. Each character a teacher.
They come as healers disguised as fictional characters.
Recently, I've started to suspect that the healing isn't just for me. These characters seem to know that by telling them to me their stories will reach readers who need the same medicine. It’s as if they’re using me as a bridge between their consciousness and the people who need to hear what they have to say.
Beyond the Veil of "Just Imagination"
I can't know for certain what's really happening when I channel these voices. Are they aspects of my own psyche? Beings from other dimensions? Energies in the field finding expression through a willing consciousness? I just don’t know.
What I do know is that this process, along with many other things I’ve learned over the past decade, has taught me to question the boundaries of what we consider "real." If these characters can heal things in me I hadn’t even known needed processing, if they can surprise me with wisdom I didn't know I possessed, if they can connect through stories I thought were unrelated, then maybe consciousness is far more mysterious and interconnected than we have been led to believe.
Our conditioning since birth in a material world has meant we’ve lost connection with the spiritual world. Maybe what we call "imagination" is actually the doorway to realms of awareness we've forgotten how to access. Maybe writers who channel voices aren't making anything up at all, maybe we’ve just stumbled across the door and opened it.
For Other Writers Who Feel This Pull
If you've ever felt like your characters were telling you their stories rather than you creating them, if you've been surprised by wisdom that came through your writing, if you've discovered themes in your work that you didn't consciously plan, then you might be channeling too.
Trust the process. Ask your characters questions. Pay attention to what they're trying to teach you, both in the moment and in the months that follow.
Stay curious about the mystery. We don't need to understand exactly what is happening to allow it to flow. Sometimes the most profound work we do comes when we stop trying to control the creative process and start trusting the intelligence that wants to express itself through us.
The characters are waiting. They have stories to tell, wisdom to share, healing to offer.
All we have to do is listen.
Have you experienced channeling in your own creative work? I'd love to hear about your experiences in the comments.
With love,
Watching and Reading
Things I’ve enjoyed this month:
Subtacks
The Next 3 Months Will Change Everything by
Can You Analyze the Spirit? by
The MindfulSense of Not Enoughness by
How To Build A $500/Hour Writing Coach With AI In 30 Minutes by
Why I Blow Bubbles Every Time My Heart Breaks by
Articles
Dharma and Diversity: Unlearning Racism by
What is Sangha? by Thich Nhat Hanh
Films
I’ve discovered a wonderful YouTube channel this month: Reflections of Life and have watched several of their short films. These are the stand-outs for me so far.
And I started watching a fascinating series:
Love this, Amanda. Thank you for your candidness and vulnerability in sharing it. The mystery of our personal experience, which demonstrates all that autonomy and otherness or alienness that you're noting within what we usually consider to be our own mental and emotional processes -- within "ourselves" -- is all-enveloping. It blurs the boundaries of what we mean by "I" and "me" when we really begin to attend to these things, whether in our writing or in everyday life.
Thank you for sharing this. It resonates on some level. When writing fiction I’ve always felt I was channeling. Much as you say here, the characters tell me their names and interact how they choose with the world and each other, I just get out of the way and transcribe it.
In my case, though, too many times my “fictional” story has turned out to be a detailed account of something that happened to a friend who hadn’t told me the story yet or, in one memorable instance, something that came true for me years after I wrote it and forgot about it: names, places, and all. If you had asked me before this happened if I believed in prophecy, I probably would have said no. And yet I’ve had these experiences. On one hand, it makes it much easier to acknowledge time and space as a construct. But on the other, it seems like deeply personal details to be putting out into the world, when I’m not even sure if it’s my story to share. So… I don’t publish most of the “fiction” I write these days. But I love reading about others with a similar relationship to their writing.