I spend an hour talking about fictional characters.

Let me place the scene.

I wave my hands wide and stare at my therapist. “He flipped the coffee table to clear the room so he could get to her. And then his mother slipped through his arms and fell to the ground.”

“Did he try CPR?” she asks.

“Yes, of course, but he’d never done it before. Richard’s never put his hands on anyone. He’s not loved by anyone but his mother, and she’s never shown him a kind touch. In fact, when she gets upset, she throws things at him.”

My therapist’s eyes widen with concern. “So, she’s abusive.”

“Oh, absolutely. There she is, lying on the carpet in their cluttered living room, and Richard bends down to put his ear to her chest. She’s not breathing. He panics, not knowing how to do CPR other than what he’s seen on television. But he does his best to revive her. He gives up for a minute to search for his phone but feels bad leaving her, so he returns and tries compressions again. Then, when he breathes into her mouth, her lungs won’t rise. After a while, he gives up and realizes she’s dead.”

“Interesting that Richard has so many problems with food and that’s also what kills his mother.”

“Wow. You’re right. I didn’t even put that together. Well, he continues to do strange things and eventually decides to put her in the freezer for safekeeping.” I exhale, relieved to get to the punchline of my fictional character’s crisis situation.

“Why did he do that?”

“I want to show him getting caught later and his new friends trying to understand his motive. Then, together, they will work through what he’s done. It’s pretty dramatic. He flips the table to get to his mother—makes a real mess of the place. He’s sad she’s gone, but for the first time in his life, he’s also free. There’s a lot of emotion.”

She smiles and asks a question many people ask writers, “Where do these ideas come from?”

I explain that I write what I see playing out in my head, and often, I’m learning the story as it goes, even if I do an outline. My outlines will have little parts of the puzzle, and then it’s up to me to connect the story.

“Doesn’t everyone see the story as they write or read?” she asked.

No, actually. Not at all. Some people see the words and hear the story; it makes sense to them, and they still enjoy it, but they don’t picture it in their head like a movie. I give her an example.

“Imagine an apple in your head.”

My therapist straightened herself out in her chair and closed her eyes for a second before I continued.

“In this exercise, there is a picture of several apples to compare what people see in their heads. You have something that I see, which is a pinkish apple with a yellow warm spot, flecks of brown dots, and a woody stem. Then, on the other side of the scale, you have a cartoon apple. It’s round, red, and might have a stem.”

“That’s what I see,” she admits. That’s when I learned she used to be an elementary school teacher, which was nice of her to share. It makes sense that her vision might be related to a past experience.

There is no wrong answer here. One is not better than the other. The point of the exercise is to explain that humans may hear or read the same thing, but picture things very differently.

Now, some readers might be thinking about how I’m leading this therapy session and not my therapist. Which I have to say, sit down and be quiet. I mean that kindly. By talking about fictional storylines and characters, I’m often amazed at how they relate to my experiences. It is very freeing to go to someone and speak about whatever I want, have them ask questions that make me consider more than before, and bring me back to points I’ve made but rambled past.

I’ve restarted the Sleep Diet manuscript several times, but I’m plowing through now. Nothing is going to make me go backward again. I brought up my story with my therapist, whom I’ve been seeing on and off for about five years because I wanted to talk about my creative process. There are times I’ve considered giving up this writing gig.

Then I have a vision of a nearly seven-foot blond man flipping over a table to try to save his abusive mother who has hoarded so many things in the house that he can hardly get to her. I see a woman burning her husband’s clothes on the lawn because she never forgave him for infidelity years before. And then there’s another character who finds out her adopted dog is years younger than she originally thought and she’s overcome with joy when proper medical attention saves his life. Oh, and she tends to make out with strange men in bars to feel better about herself.

I don’t think I can stop telling stories.

This has to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Yet I keep coming back and pushing through, even when I’m stuck, even when my early readers hate my stuff.

My therapist asks me if I ever dream about my characters. Which interesting, because I have, but it’s very rare. I told her I often daydream about them, or they enter my mind when things are still. So driving, showers, making dinner, right before I fall asleep tend to be very active brain time for stories to go.

“You live with that in your head?”

“Yep.” I place my fingertips on my temples. “A lot is going on in here.”