Characters and (the not so) Lonely Writer

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I’ve said before that I’m a character writer, which is actually a misnomer.  I’m a character anchor.  In the troubled sea of non-existence, they reach out and there I am.  They can infest me and, through me, impose their presence on the world.

They come to me fully formed, accost me during my walks, wake me up from a deep sleep with the first line of their story running in my head, in their own unmistakable voice.

“I never wanted to go to space,” they say.  Or “History celebrates great prison breaks.”  Or  “Dead people shouldn’t send emails.”

Let me assure you, gentle reader, (and particularly you, yes, you, in the back row, ungentle one!) I’m not talking about full fledged hallucinations, be they visual or auditory.  It’s more… the feeling you have when you remember a conversation with someone.  And you have about as much control over it as over the memory of that conversation.  Meaning, you can remember it better or worse, but you can’t change what was actually said.

Sometimes a character seems out of tune and I walk around, kicking things, hurting the feelings of small animals (Okay, only Havelock-cat and he’s only “small” by an effort of the imagination as, despite high-protein, low carb food he’s fast approaching the look of that “fat cat” on poster in every vet examining room also you hurt his feelings every time you don’t pet him) moaning and vowing never to write again.

At least, I do all that if the character belongs in a book that was due yesterday (or three months ago.)  If not, I leave the character alone, and eventually at some later date he/she will come into full focus and start yammering at me.  Sometimes a decade later…

But here’s the thing – I don’t have much control over the characters, or who they are.  I can change how I present them to people, but I can’t change who they are and what they are going to do/how they’re going to react in a situation.  The situation itself can be tweaked, but not the general “feel” of the story.

Before you call the men in white coats, I DON’T think these characters have independent life.  I simply think all my character work happens at a very deep level.  My subconscious (for lack of a better word) knows what interests me most (people) and so baits me with that by making me believe they exist and have stories to tell.  Without that bait, it’s possible I’d never write, because the rest of the craft I’ve had to learn hand-over-hand and consciously, and it’s work.

But once I’ve met a good/bad/heroic/interesting character, I WANT to know more, and I want to figure out who these people are and become friends – after a fashion.

Now, I don’t always know if the characters are good or bad, particularly for deeply flawed, struggling characters.  (I’d say Marlon, in Witchfinder is somewhere between heaven and hell, between hero and craven coward, and sometimes both of those at the same time.  I struggle with him because he’s reserved, and won’t give me more than I need to know at any given time.  This means, indubitably, I’ll need to do a lot of minuscule adjustments to his part in rewrite.  Or not.  Sometimes it comes across perfectly, I’m just not used to characters who hold back.  Or rather, I don’t want to get used to them.)  But trying to force the characters into what they’re not always breaks them, and sometimes breaks the book.

Am I normal?  No.  As in the divide between the naturally confident and naturally terrified writer, there is no “normal.”  More women than men – in general – get characters this way.  More men than women get plots and then “audition” characters and discard those that don’t fit.  But that’s not necessarily a given.  I’ve known women who audition characters.  I’ve known men who get accosted in the back alleys of the mind by characters going “Hey buddy, want to hear a story?”

My husband auditions characters.  My son gets them yammering away in his mind.  My other son auditions them.

There is another level of character writing, somewhere more conscious than “audition.”  I didn’t meet that till I tried to collaborate with a writer who does this (Yes, yes, for those who know, that IS coming.  G-d willing this year, if my body will let me.)  That’s a writer who assembles characters like a police description chart.  “We’ll make him sociable like so and so.  He’ll have HER trick of speech.  And he’ll be good at math like HIM.”  The pick and choose among their friends and assemble chimeras.

I CAN do that (sort of) but the characters never come alive.  They just lie there, like Frankenstein creations, all their stitches showing.  So, I’m at the mercy of my subconscious.  Even if I have a great idea for a plot, I have to wait for the character to walk up and go “Let me tell you this story.”

Now, can I steal incidents, events, even utterances.  Sure.  My sons have accused me of selling their childhood in the Daring Finds books.  (And that’s only because they haven’t seen Orphan Kittens, yet.)  I use incidents and events.  I can also tuckerize people in walk on parts or relatively short appearances.  But don’t ask me to have you along from beginning to end, unless there’s an alternate of yours lurching around somewhere in character world who wants to approach me and go “Let me tell you a story.”

12 thoughts on “Characters and (the not so) Lonely Writer”

  1. I’m not sure how it works for me. Perhaps a little of both. I’ve a setting for a series of stories. Some of “my” characters have said “here I am” and others I’ve had to “search for”.

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  2. I think I’m a bit more holistic, or something. When I get a novel idea it’s a full-blown idea: I know the start, some scenes in the middle, and the ending. The main character, and often secondary characters, are there as well. They’re fully formed, though I don’t know them. I end up doing a series of interviews to figure them out. But it feels like discovery, not creation. Sub-plots and additional characters get created often.

    Once the novel idea is there, the characters start talking with me. They tell me parts of their lives that I need to know while I’m walking, cooking, napping, taking a shower, trying to go to sleep at night, etc. My subconscious builds great things for me while I’m sleeping, solves problems and fleshes out characters. I just have to get out of my own way, listen, then write.

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  3. Mine tend to just show up. Sometimes I logically decide I need to add a character, sometimes to kill or to give a motive to the Main Character or even “You know this guy has a boss, he at least needs a name.” And suddenly, there he is, and that plot hole is neatly filled by him because he’s the brother-in-law of the main suspect and he deliberately . . . The subconscious either works really fast, or I logically decide things because it’s finally gotten through to the other side of the brain.

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  4. To an extent we all fill our lives with characters. We don’t know other people so much as they become characters in the stories we tell ourselves about reality. So, basing characters on people around you or people not around you is mostly a matter of degree. Knowingly interacting with non-existent characters is probably healthier than thinking the people with whom you are interacting are actually the characters you thought they were.

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      1. Those of us with near-Aspbergers come to recognize our limits.

        In the interval after posting that comment I wondered what might be the story of someone engaged in online interaction with a character … could go horror, could go spiritual (spiritual??? Well, what if G-d in His Heaven has His angels busy on the internet … for that matter, why wouldn’t our father below have his demons similarly employed? I can imagine Poe, Bierce, Lewis or Pratchett producing great entertainment therefrom.)

        No, it isn’t my idea, I just found it laying there and I’m not going to turn it into anything. I don’t have the muse (when in my twenties I got the b*tch drunk, murdered her, cut off her head and hands, drove a stake through her heart, crammed garlic into her mouth and buried her at a crossroads under a full moon.) Having weird ideas is easy, turning them into stories and inserting characters is d*mn hard work.

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        1. I’m trying to remember the name — Charles, are you there? Do you know? — of the author who did something similar with phone calls. Horror.
          I’ve often been fascinated by the idea of emails from the dead. I know, but…

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  5. I wonder about myself. The one time I consciously set out to design a character it was a set of characters, deliberately designed to be red shirts. And, in the course of trying to make them at least two-dimensional, I got to know them too well. They’re now going about taking over their SECOND story. And the reddest of the redshirts is now the — in Marlow’s words — “the wench” who’s dead and it was another country.

    I’d love to be able to learn the trick of repeating that at will. And I wonder if I’ll ever be able to do it again.

    M

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  6. It helps — or, at least, it helps me — to have met a lot of people. (Of course, the downside of that is that it takes time. By the time you’ve met enough people, the staff of the nursing home might not let you have a computer.)

    When I need a character, I begin by introducing a few characteristics, a comment or bit of dialogue, or some minor action. After that, my subconscious sorts through the people I’ve met and comes up with somebody — as RES points out, above, it’s by definition either a caricature or a pastiche, but it’s at least based on somebody real — and from there I have a basis for stimulus-and-response interaction with the other characters. I rarely or never consciously put a name on the person I’m modeling; “Ah, yes, that’s Lt. XX, and I know what he’d do in that situation” is rare for me, but if I think about it in retrospect I can usually figure out who the model was. Once in a while when I do that, I go back and modify some of that character’s behavior to more closely fit the model, but that’s rare, too.

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