the characters made me!

[contrariwise.livejournal.com]

So I was browsing at the library and picked up Janet Evanovich's^* How I Write. Right there, on page 14, an interesting passage jumped out at me:

Q: Some people say they start writing and the character tells them what's next. In other words, the characters take over for the author. Do your characters ever surprise you like that?

Janet: NO! What does surprise me is that people say this happens. This is fiction! Your character doesn't do anything you don't want him to!

You do have to be very careful never to force a character to do something simply because you think he needs to do it for the sake of the plot or because you think it's funny or because you think it's hot or it's cute or whatever. Characters have to do what they are supposed to do according to your creation of them and your plot line. The bottom line is: Writers control the story and the characters. And don't let anyone tell you different--particularly your main character.

For some reason, I thought immediately of a certain author...


^*She writes the Stephanie Plum series, featuring a spunky (but not very good at her job) bounty hunter, her wacky family, and her two on-again/off-again hot dudes. It's a fluff series, but it knows it. *g*

Comments

[darksongtrilogy.livejournal.com]

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.