Huh. I used to say that my characters never do anything I don't tell them to do. Then I actually started fighting with them.
There's a line where it crosses from the creative process to outright insanity, and we know LKH threw herself over that line long ago. But my characters talk to me the same way my stories write themselves. I can consciously plot, problem solve, decide where my character is going when. But what is it that put these people and places in my head in the first place? Why does my main character have auburn hair instead of blonde or black? Why does she have the name she has, and why would I never for a second consider changing it?
For those of us that are writers, how do we come up with this stuff at all? Characters are an extension of that creative process, IMO. The places in my stories don't exist, but there are certain ways I'd never describe them, certain things that would just never be there. The places speak to me as much as my characters do, and all I could say to explain it is, "that's the way it is." That's how I saw it. I have no idea why I saw it that way.
It's the way the author sees the movie in their head, though most of us couldn't explain where the movie comes from.
I reject the LKH brand of character relations--that's just pretentious at best, or literally crazy at worse. I lean toward thinking she's trying to puff herself up as an artiste with that kind of talk. But I also reject the flat realism of "my characters do what I say they do." Mine don't, anymore than my stories go precisely the way I planned them to go. Other stuff comes up. I have to fight with the secondary characters to make them do what I want. (Which means I struggle, their dialogue doesn't come naturally, their actions are out of character, or at least the character I've imagined.) Fighting with characters is an extension of fighting with the worlds we've created. Whether it's our writer-subconsciousness we're fighting with or not, I don't know, but there IS a level of reality that makes places and people very definite in a writer's head.
no subject
There's a line where it crosses from the creative process to outright insanity, and we know LKH threw herself over that line long ago. But my characters talk to me the same way my stories write themselves. I can consciously plot, problem solve, decide where my character is going when. But what is it that put these people and places in my head in the first place? Why does my main character have auburn hair instead of blonde or black? Why does she have the name she has, and why would I never for a second consider changing it?
For those of us that are writers, how do we come up with this stuff at all? Characters are an extension of that creative process, IMO. The places in my stories don't exist, but there are certain ways I'd never describe them, certain things that would just never be there. The places speak to me as much as my characters do, and all I could say to explain it is, "that's the way it is." That's how I saw it. I have no idea why I saw it that way.
It's the way the author sees the movie in their head, though most of us couldn't explain where the movie comes from.
I reject the LKH brand of character relations--that's just pretentious at best, or literally crazy at worse. I lean toward thinking she's trying to puff herself up as an artiste with that kind of talk. But I also reject the flat realism of "my characters do what I say they do." Mine don't, anymore than my stories go precisely the way I planned them to go. Other stuff comes up. I have to fight with the secondary characters to make them do what I want. (Which means I struggle, their dialogue doesn't come naturally, their actions are out of character, or at least the character I've imagined.) Fighting with characters is an extension of fighting with the worlds we've created. Whether it's our writer-subconsciousness we're fighting with or not, I don't know, but there IS a level of reality that makes places and people very definite in a writer's head.