"It's alive, it's alive..."

"We hear that for many writers, the characters they create 'come alive' during the writing process. But in what ways is that phrase more than a simple metaphor? And how is a writer supposed to manage the expanded household as it begins to fill up with progeny spilling over from the pages of a work in progress?
     My third novel, All the Light There Was, which is set in the Armenian community of Paris during the Nazi Occupation, took 10 years to research and write. […]
     While I was writing, I traveled back in time and across the ocean to Occupied Paris. I could not only hear the voices of my characters, but I could also feel the cold air seeping in the cracks around the window frames, and smell the dreaded rutabagas cooking in the kitchen. I fretted with Maral over her lack of bath soap, and shared the frustration of her cobbler father about his inability to get leather. But it wasn't until the day that my husband asked me why we had seven jars of mustard in the pantry that I realized how deep this shared experience had gone."
— Nancy Kricorian, Huffington Post
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