My new book, From Here to Argentina: A Tango Love Story, began with my dreaming a song I’d never heard before. It played in my memory when I forgot the dream itself.”Odd,” I thought. “Who would sing a song like that?”
Fictional characters, in my writing experience, show up fully formed, and my happy task is to explore who they are. The character, Mikhail, stepped out of my imagination into view as the song’s singer.
It occurred to me that “meeting” Mikhail was much like going to my first Argentine Social Tango classes, embracing my partners in tango’s intimacy before I knew anything else about them, certainly not the depths of their pasts, or their aspirations beyond learning the subtle and complex dance.
I set myself the challenge of throwing five equal protagonists together in a tango class in my short novel. Juniper, Dan, Esteban, and Rosalie joined Mikhail, the music began, and we were on our way.