What is your relationship with your characters? Now, mine is distant, chilly, neglectful. I’m working on something mechanical and so this instant they are a nuisance to me. I am aggrieved that it is so.

Here is what John Berger says in one of my favorite books And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos:

What separates us from the characters about whom we write is not knowledge, either objective or subjective, but their experience of time in the story we are telling. This separation allows us, the storytellers, the power of knowing the whole. Yet, equally, this separation renders us powerless: we cannot control our characters, after the narration has begun. We are obliged to follow them, and this following is through and across the time, which they are living and which we oversee.

The time, and therefore the story, belongs to them. Yet the meaning of the story, what makes it worthy of being told, is what we can see and what inspires us because we are beyond its time.