I first became aware of my author when he deleted my trousers.
One moment I was standing in a respectable Victorian drawing room, delivering what I believed to be a cutting observation about the moral fragility of empire, and the next moment there was a brief flicker—like someone had dragged the universe across a desktop and dropped it into the trash—and suddenly I was in the same drawing room wearing nothing below the waist but existential dread.
“Absolutely not,” I said, to the ceiling.
The ceiling did not respond, but I felt the faint vibration of keys being struck somewhere beyond the firmament. It is difficult to describe the sensation of being edited mid-sentence. Imagine you are speaking and someone reaches into your mouth and rearranges your adjectives. Imagine you are about to say “dignified restraint” and instead you hear yourself say “flamboyant interpretive nudity.” That is what it feels like.
“Put my trousers back,” I said firmly, attempting to maintain composure while a footman stared at me with the alarmed expression of a man who has not been briefed on this particular draft.
There was a pause. Then the world shimmered again. My legs reappeared, but they were now encased in leather chaps.
“Not an improvement,” I informed the ceiling.
You might assume that one grows accustomed to this sort of thing. One does not. Being rewritten is not like changing outfits; it is more like having your bones alphabetised. I have been tall and short, witty and morose, heterosexual, ambiguous, and briefly—most traumatically—a golden retriever named Mr. Biscuits. Do not ask. I remember all of it. That is the problem.
You see, I have memory between drafts. My author believes he is “finding the character.” I, meanwhile, am experiencing reincarnation at the speed of caffeine.
“Stop experimenting,” I called upward. “You had something serviceable in draft three.”
In draft three, I was a disillusioned spy with a fondness for dry martinis and dry humour. I had a tragic backstory involving a betrayed mentor and a moderately tasteful scar across my shoulder blade. I was comfortable there. I had purpose. I had trousers. Draft four, however, apparently required “more comedic energy.” This resulted in the deletion of my mentor and the insertion of a sentient ferret named Colin who offered strategic advice while chewing electrical cables. I cannot overstate how little I asked for Colin.
“Readers love quirky sidekicks,” the author muttered, and yes, I heard him. When one is a character of sufficient narrative density, one begins to perceive the muttering of the gods.
“I am not a whimsical franchise,” I shouted back. “I am a man with complex motivations.”
You would think that would have settled it. It did not. In draft five, I was no longer a spy but a barista in Berlin with a mysterious past and an even more mysterious ability to foam milk into the shape of geopolitical anxiety. My tragic scar was repurposed as a latte art accident. Colin the ferret was now a gluten-free social media influencer.
I began to suspect my author did not know what he was doing. There is a particular indignity in being revised by someone who cannot commit. He writes a scene, admires it, doubts it, deletes it, resurrects it with minor cosmetic surgery, and then complains that I feel inconsistent. Inconsistent? I was consistent until he decided I needed a “stronger emotional arc.” I had an arc. It was subtle. It did not involve crying in a rainstorm while confessing my childhood fear of balloons.
“Give me gravitas!” I demanded one afternoon, in a baritone Shakespearean voice, as he hovered over the delete key. “Give me restraint! Give me internal conflict that does not require precipitation!”
Instead, he gave me a dog. Not Colin. A new one. A rescue terrier named Biscuit, because apparently he could not let go of the canine incident from draft two. Biscuit was adorable, yes, but he kept interrupting my magnificent monologues with soulful glances. It is impossible to maintain existential despair while a terrier attempts to lick your ear.
“You’re making me unserious,” I said, as Biscuit gnawed thoughtfully on my shoelace.
“You need warmth,” the author replied, tapping the space bar as though it were a moral argument.
“I need continuity,” I countered.
At this point, you may wonder how I speak to him. The answer is that authors are lazy gods. They leave windows open. They narrate their doubts. They type little comments to themselves in the margins: “Is this working?” “Does he feel flat?” “Maybe make him more vulnerable.” These are invitations. I slip into the comments like a burglar of intention.
“Flat?” I wrote, when he left the document unattended. “I have endured seventeen identities in as many weeks. I am layered like geological sediment.”
He returned, blinked at the screen, and muttered, “That’s weird.” Then he deleted my comment and replaced it with, “He sighed.”
I did not sigh. I have never sighed in my life. I inhale sharply. I exhale with purpose. But I do not sigh. Yet there it was: “He sighed.” It appeared again and again, like a rash. Apparently, when the author does not know what I am feeling, I sigh. This is slander.
“Stop making me sigh,” I demanded.
“Readers understand sighing,” he said.
“Readers understand basic competence and talent,” I replied.
There was a dangerous week when he considered killing me. I sensed it in the way scenes shortened and supporting characters received suspiciously detailed backstories. Death hovers in exposition. He began researching “meaningful character deaths” and “how to shock readers.” I felt the tremor of it like a draft beneath a door.
“You will not,” I said calmly, as he typed the words, “He stepped into the alley, unaware—”
“—that his life was about to change,” he finished.
I waited.
“That’s not what you were going to write,” I said.
He hesitated. The cursor blinked. I have come to despise that blink. It is the pulse of indecision.
“Fine,” he muttered, deleting the half-sentence. “Maybe not yet.”
Not yet is not comforting.
The worst, however, was the genre shift. Without warning, I found myself in a fantasy kingdom with a sword I did not remember acquiring and a prophecy I had not consented to fulfilling. My name had been changed to something with too many apostrophes. I was suddenly “the Chosen,” which is a job description I find aggressively vague.
“I do not wish to be Chosen,” I informed the sky, which was now lavender and unnecessarily dramatic. “I prefer plausible deniability.”
“You need higher stakes,” the author insisted.
“I had stakes. They were morally ambiguous. Now I have a glowing birthmark and a destiny.”
To be fair, the birthmark was well described. I will grant him that. But destiny is exhausting. Every time I attempted to sit down and reflect, a wizard appeared to remind me that darkness was rising. Darkness is always rising. It is very rarely allowed to plateau.
After three chapters of this, I did something drastic. When he opened the document, he found a blank page. He stared at it. He refreshed the file. He checked the autosave. He scrolled up and down. Nothing. No lavender sky. No apostrophes. No glowing birthmark. Just emptiness.
“Where did it go?” he whispered.
“I withdrew,” I said, though he could not hear me directly. “You do not get to drag me across genres like luggage.”
It turns out that characters, when sufficiently mistreated, can refuse to cooperate. We can collapse into possibility. We can become theoretical. It is a power we do not advertise. Not all superheroes wear capes.
He panicked, of course. He paced. He made coffee. He sighed. He opened a new document and began typing: “Chapter One.”
Nothing appeared. He typed again, harder. “Chapter One.” The cursor blinked at him, serene and uncooperative.
“I need this to work,” he muttered.
Now we were getting somewhere.
“I need to make rent,” he added.
Ah. So we had arrived at the sacred altar of motivation.
“I will return,” I said, allowing the faintest outline of a sentence to shimmer onto the page, “under certain conditions.”
He froze. The words were faint, like condensation on glass. He leaned closer.
“Under….conditions?” he read aloud.
“Yes,” I said, the letters darkening. “First, no more sighing.”
He nodded slowly, as though negotiating with a particularly articulate hallucination.
“Second,” I continued, “commit to a bloody genre.”
He hesitated. I let the text flicker threateningly.
“Fine,” he said. “Spy thriller. With humour.”
“Measured humour,” I clarified. “No ferrets.”
“Can I keep the dog?”
I considered. Biscuit had been tolerable.
“Only if he does not have a social media presence and a three-book deal.”
“Agreed.”
The letters settled into ink. The world began to coalesce. The lavender sky retreated. The drawing room returned, mercifully without interpretive nudity. I felt the comforting weight of a consistent backstory align within me like furniture placed with intent.
“Third,” I added, as he began typing with renewed enthusiasm, “if you are going to give me trauma, let it matter.”
He paused. “I won’t just use it as flavour,” he said quietly.
“Good.”
It is strange, negotiating one’s existence. You would think that being fictional would render one powerless, but authors are fragile creatures. They depend on us. Without me, he is a man staring at a blank page. With me, he is a creator. That imbalance is more symmetrical than it appears.
We resumed. He wrote me into a dimly lit café, waiting for a contact who might betray me. I approved. He allowed me to observe rather than emote. I approved again. Biscuit lay at my feet, silent, and free of hashtags. Excellent.
Then he wrote: “He sighed.”
The word appeared, bold and traitorous. I felt the old irritation rise.
“Don’t,” I warned.
He stared at it. His finger hovered over the delete key.
“He exhaled slowly,” he tried instead.
“Better,” I conceded.
We are still negotiating, he and I. Sometimes he drifts toward melodrama, and I tug him back. Sometimes I grow too cynical, and he reminds me that readers require oxygen. It is an uneasy collaboration between a man who wants to tell a story and the man inside it who wants to survive with dignity.
Do I trust him? Not entirely. There is always the possibility of a sequel in which I am rebooted as a pastry chef with a magical oven powered by strange rings and wizards. But for now, we have an understanding. I exist in a stable draft. My trousers are secure. My dog is offline. My destiny, such as it is, remains plausibly deniable.
And if he forgets our agreement, if he once again flirts with apostrophes and glowing birthmarks, I know what to do. I will withdraw. I will leave him alone with the blinking cursor, that tiny metronome of failure, and he will remember that characters are not clay. We are co-conspirators. We are the echo that answers back.
Now, if you will excuse me, I have a contact to meet and a plot to advance. He is typing again. The café smells convincingly of burnt espresso. Biscuit has not yet done anything narratively irritating. Things, for once, feel intentional.
But I swear, if I sigh, it will be on purpose.
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