So there I was, at the Barony of the Cleftlands Yule Revel. I hadn’t been to any SCA meetings in a very long time, mostly because we moved date night to Wednesdays. I was a little nervous how I’d be received, the prodigal squire, and excited to see friends I hadn’t seen outside of a Facebook invite in over a year.
The first person to see me waved. “Your writing has really taken off,” she said.
“Yes. Thanks. It’s been a crazy good year for me.”
“Do your characters write your stories?”
I shook my head. “No, alas, I write the stories.”
“But do, like, the characters give you ideas how to move things?”
“Nope. I do that, too.”
“Huh.” She seemed out of things to say, and we moved on to other topics.
“Do your characters write your stories?” is a question I’d been asked before, and I dimly recall one of my college classmates talking about HER characters writing her stories, which at the time had confused me.
The question stuck with me as I moved through the room, helping hang plastic snowflakes and strings of beaded garland. Why would anyone ask that?
Then I got asked it again. “Do your characters write your stories? I heard that good writers, the characters write the stories.”
I fobbed him off with a version of what I’d said before. And then I got asked it AGAIN. By this time, I’d formulated a snarky response.
“No, my lazy characters make me do it all.”
“Ah,” this person said, smiling knowingly, “You’re not that advanced yet.”
Score: three times! Three people asked me about my writing, and all three asked me if my characters wrote the stories for me. What WAS this? Had there been a famous essay or something recently by some author spouting this?
When the fourth friend asked, I replied with, “Why do people ask that? Why do they think a fictional character would do any of the work for me?”
“Oh. Well, I mean… [famous author] said that she had a plot point, and her character just wouldn’t do it, so she had to change the story.”
“That’s not the character writing the story. That’s the author realizing the action doesn’t fit the character.”
“Well, it’s kinda… did you see that movie about Charles Dickens? Oh it’s so nice. As he makes up the characters, they walk around and harass him! Isn’t that what it’s like? Don’t you talk to your characters?”
I left the conversation half convinced that the maker of that movie (or all movies with authors writing in them) had a lot to answer for, and half wondering if there was something wrong with me that my relationship to the people I make up is so… sterile and professional.
I have never “talked to my characters.” The closest I’ve ever come is a deep-throated chuckle when I make something particularly horrible happen to them.
The story I’m working on right now… the main character is me. I’m just self-inserting how I’d react. When you read one of my stories with a first person protagonist who doesn’t get a physical description (and may even fail to have a name and gender) that’s usually just me being me. (Except when it’s not. Views expressed by character are not necessarily that of the author.)
All my characters are in some ways me. My villains are me at my darkest, my heroes are me if I were a better person. I base a lot of my characters on my friends and acquaintances, and I fill in the things I don’t know about them with what’s inside my head. Hortensia, the main character of “A Place to Stand On”? She’s named after a college classmate, has character attributes (lack of trust in others) that fit the plot, reasons better than I do and is more practical than I am, but when I describe how things look through her eyes? I’m doing it.
If Hortensia did something that wasn’t suitably stubborn in the first draft, I went back and cut it. That was a mistake on my part, not something the character did.
But I don’t think this is really what people are asking.
The question really is, “Do you plot from character concept first?” with a dash of “Is your drafting process unconscious?”
I tend to start my stories with a plot or technology or theme, and then I pick a character to go with those. Sometimes I have a character I’ve been wanting to write and I start with putting him in a situation. So: sometimes, yes, I start with a character. “Infinite Boyfriends” started with wanting to write my friend Stacey as a mad scientist.
And yes, sometimes the zigs and zags of plot are made for unconscious reasons–it just feels like the right thing to have happen.
But I’m never going to cede the responsibility and blame for those zigs and zags.
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