Writers who write too much about characters who talk too much

[inverarity]

I don't understand authors who say that their plot bunnies “run away with them,” or that their characters have “minds of their own” and won't do what they say. Stories are not living entities that can argue with you and change direction on their own. Fictional characters – no matter how vibrant and well-realized – are still just mental constructs. Everything your stories and characters “do” is a product of your own mind.

That's not to say my characters aren't “real” to me. Alexandra is sometimes frighteningly real inside my head – I know her better than I know many non-fictitious acquaintances. I know exactly what she looks like (the artwork I and other people have created comes close, but I have never been able to perfectly capture the mental picture in my head on screen or paper), I know what her voice sounds like, and I know all kinds of details about her that will probably never appear in my stories, because they aren't relevant. Like her favorite color (yellow), and her very first fight with Billy Boggleston (he tried to cut in line for the swings). I know that she read Twilight, and she thought that Edward Cullen was creepy, and she wished the bad-guy vampires would just eat Bella.



But anyway, Alexandra doesn't talk to me (which is a good thing, because I don't think she'd be very happy with me), or decide what she's going to do in her story.

That doesn't mean that my story meticulously follows the outline I've written, though. Because that's where writing discipline comes in – and I don't have a lot. Talent? Maybe. Discipline? Not so much. My chapters tend to multiply, like greedy amoebas swelling larger and larger as I feed them more words, until the one chapter I planned splits into two.

And for the first time, I have a new character who thinks she has a mind of her own: running amok, chewing up scenery, and demanding more lines every time she shows up. Now, she's still doing what she's told – she has a role to play in the story, and it's not changing. But she needs to behave and go back into my little mental construct-box and stop stealing word-count.

So, besides that little bit of teaser, do I have anything else for you? Why, yes, I do:



In The Nursery - Ground Loop

As I work my way towards the climax of AQATDR (no, sorry, I'm not close yet), this is the song that plays in my head, over and over.

I know you probably could care less about my musical tastes, so I have something even better: fan art!

First, some illustrations by Tim the Enchanter, of Mugglenet Fan Fiction.



Why is Alexandra wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt? I have no idea – I don't ask where Tim gets his ideas.

The Automagicka

From Chapter 4 of Alexandra Quick and the Thorn Circle.



She saw something that resembled a double-decker Formula One race car, and a huge black sedan with a sinister grill that actually snarled at cars in front of it, and as Ms. Grimm finally left the magical highway, they passed a bus that looked almost normal except that it had seven wheels.

Archie and Charlie

From Chapter 7 of Alexandra Quick and the Thorn Circle.



“Same damn thing,” said Archie. “They're just noisy pests. Good for nothing but target practice.”

This picture of Alexandra, looking a little bit older (perhaps 14 or so) is by Bellanca, also of MNFF:



And finally, I guess I'll share one more picture I did myself, at the start of the summer. This is a preliminary rough draft of the cover of AQATDR, using an image you've seen before:



There are some more elements to add, and the lighting needs work. The shirt will cover her belly in the final version.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Goodness, I thought as soon as this article started, is there anything we shall EVER agree on? For the attitude of "letting the characters do what they will" is exactly my attitude towards my writing. Of course, I may be the world's worst writer, but then it is also the attitude of authors whose greatness I regard as a given - to mention a couple, Charles Dickens and Jack Kirby. Dickens rarely knew where a novel would end when he started it, and Kirby repeatedly stated that he was often as suprised as anyone at what turned up on the page. Perhaps that is a cartoonist thing - I have been a cartoonist myself, and I know exactly what he meant.

But then, as I went on reading, it struck me that what we really have is two different ways to state pretty much the same thing. I think you may perhaps be reading the idea in question as lack of discipline, as self-indulgence. I read it as the opposite: as humility before the characters, as letting them be what their own internal balance demands that they should be, rather than use them in predetermined patterns that you impose on them. And what you say about knowing exactly how Alexandra would react in a given situation is at least a part of what I mean by letting your character live your own life. There are two sins that bad writers regularly commit to their characters. One is ideology: forcing them to develop along certain lines because their ideology says that those lines are good in themselves. The other is sloppiness, and it is best exemplified in a really terrible fanfic I read years ago, which had the Patil twins commit incest. Now that in itself is not so bad; the fact is that the author simply did not in the least engage with the twins' character as shown in the stories, with their background, ethnicity, viewpoints - she even went as far as speaking of one twin's "pale skin". Pale skin? A pair of Indian girls? Have you ever even seen one? The author simply wanted to write an incest fic and did not care who the characters were so long as she could shoehorn them in somehow. As I said in an angry comment, the author might as well have used the Barbi twins - or the Bobbsey twins.

It is as compared to this sort of thing that the idea of letting the characters do what they want really shows what it means. It means having the story develop from the characters, their habits of mind, their attitudes, their abilities, so that any encounter between two characters will have a different dynamic according to which character they are. A conversation between Frodo and Gandalf will have a different dynamic, even perhaps a different vocabulary, than a conversation between Pippin and Gandalf, even though both are young hobbits. And I am sure that you know this as well as I do.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I know that she read Twilight, and she thought that Edward Cullen was creepy, and she wished the bad-guy vampires would just eat Bella.

LOL!!! Yeah, Alexandra strikes me as the kind of girl who would have absolutely no sympathy for emo helpless heroines who thrill to be at the mercy of powerful mysterious men. I see her as more the Pippi Longstocking fan ... or more currently maybe Agatha Hetrodyne of Girl Genius (though that's a bit obscure).

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php

though the current comic shows Agatha in an unusually vulnerable moment; she's normally not as soft as she is being around Gilgamesh Wulfenbach in that Aug 05th strip. But then, he's Gil, probably the only hero she's ever met in that universe who's around her age.

[lonely-lycanth.livejournal.com]

Here I go, lurking like a Cullen on your livejournal, ha ha. No, actually, I just remembered liking your fic, and decided to see if you had posted anything about its progress. I really do envy your ability to finish it before posting. I'm okay at doing that with original work (and I almost never finish that), but to me, fanfiction involves a certain amount of instant gratification. In this way, I suppose it requires a bit more discipline, because then I have to decide what I want up front and then just make it work--no going back and fixing large structural problems after, so you have to get it right the first time.

Anyway, I only really meant to comment to say that I agree with what you said about "plot bunnies running away from you." I have always thought that notion was mostly ridiculous. "Mostly," because if you are having a great deal of trouble trying to force your story to go in a certain direction, and it just won't, nine times out of ten that points to a larger problem in the plot or characterization that you haven't fixed. I say all this, and still have a Tolkien fic in progress that only has the barest hints of an outlined plot. I tell myself this is because it is "character based," but really I'm just being lazy. Oh well.

Best luck to you! I hope you finish the next story soon.