In The Matisse Puzzle, characters move from book to the internet and back

Why shouldn't characters live as valid a life as their creators', indeed as real as the way their readers imagine them? What is reality anyway? Can we blur the edges of fact and fiction, of author, character, reader? Can we make life more interesting by pushing beyond the traditional boundaries? If characters step off the page, or jump out of the movie screen, they may very well have a chance to live in the ‘real world,’ rather than the one they have been placed in. What if they want to cry ‘freedom’, and be independent of their creators, and stand on their own feet, inventing their own life, instead of just saying the lines written for them?

Characters popping up in the real world

In Woody Allen’s movie, The Purple Rose of Cairo, the audience in a cinema are watching the characters in a film playing out the plot, the way they are expected to. Suddenly, one of them declares he wants to join the audience and experience real life, and he steps out from the screen and starts talking to a girl he has noticed from his film-set world. 

The film has this strange effect many of Woody Allen's films transmit: the breaking of boundaries between the real and the virtual, between life and fiction. I want to explore this side of the narrative mystery. I think it is likely to fascinate. I think it is likely to make life seem fuller, rounder, better articulated. In The Matisse Puzzle (released in April, this year), we have made an attempt to replicate this strange multidimensional effect.
Another avenue worth exploring is the fact that characters may start in the mind of their author-creator in one way, but every single individual who reads the book has an image and sense of the character which may be different from the one intended.
Is that not a valid definition of existence? Even a character so well known as Jane Austen’s Lizzie Bennett, will have a unique identity in the mind and heart of every fan. So in a sense Lizzie lives in different forms in each of those individual readers. So who can say she is not real, when she exists in some dendrite of each of those brains.

The wonders of the internet are great

Recently, the Guardian ran a story about children’s authors being interviewed by their characters played by child fans dressed up in appropriate costume. This was just a basic Q and A session, but it opens a door to deeper possibilities.

These days, crowd-sourcing and fan fiction sites are used to invite fans to create more characters or more plot lines: in fact as many plots as there are people interested.

Isn't that fascinating?, we asked ourselves while we were creating the book we are about to launch. In The Matisse Puzzle, we want to explore some of these intriguing possibilities. In our plot, some of the characters are fictional, some are fictional versions of real people. Some of them live not only through the book's plot, but through their own blogs, through their own avatars, through their own digital ID's, in which the book (the object) turns out to be insufficient to cover their full complexity. Social media take center stage in this novel, which we hope to be as original as the promises we are making here.
So let us know if you'd like to read a novel of this kind, which explores not only story, but also the media capable of carrying the said story along.