Characters and Direction

The responses to my last post really got me thinking about characters and their relation to a story.

Characters have always felt very real to me, as though they were my friends and not simply the creations of my imagination. I often discover that characters I designed as mere walk-ons will end up taking on greater importance as a story progresses. And I do feel that they have wills of their own, because when I submerge myself in them, I feel their voices and their desires more strongly than I do my authorial planning.

Often when I'm having trouble getting through a scene, I discover that what is missing is a deep sense of what one of the characters needs. Sometimes that missing point is a sense of the judgment of the point of view character, and other times it's the motivation of the other person in the conversation (as happened recently with the romantic lead in my novel).

I originally started writing short stories as a way to get to know characters who couldn't be point of view characters in the novels I was writing, but whom I wanted to know better. This means that when I first wrote short stories, they felt like vignette snippets from a larger piece of work, and I needed to do a lot of work to grasp the structure of a stand-alone short story. But I did find that going to the trouble of creating a voice for a character helped me to understand them better for the purposes of both the short story and the novel. My main bad guy from the Varin world, the Eminence Nekantor, became a completely different character when I got close enough to figure out precisely how he thinks. Now I find that I love a really challenging character voice - like the mentally ill Nekantor or the alien Rulii - even when it can take me an hour to get into the proper head space to write the voice fluently.

It can sometimes be difficult to know which character to use for the primary backbone of a story. Janice Hardy was the one who really drove the critical criterion home to me: it's a question of stakes. The primary point of view must belong to the person who has the most to gain or lose in the course of the story. So while dallying in other viewpoints can be instructive and help you to flesh out a story, it's not necessarily what will get the story written. To extend the backbone metaphor, if you don't have your backbone in the right place, it's hard to know where to hang the flesh so the body will actually work properly. I wrote about half of a novel believing that my backbone character was one person, and then found it petering out. Only some time later did I realize that I'd picked the wrong person. Now that I have the focus placed correctly, the outline of the story is clear to me from beginning to end, and I can't wait to write it.

Janice and I got talking after my last post about the question of letting a character take charge of the story's direction. She pointed out to me that what I had described as letting the story follow the character was somewhat misleading, because it could have been construed as meaning that the story had no direction and rambled on wherever the character wanted to go. Of course, I thought, that wasn't what I meant. Janice has a way of knowing precisely what the stakes of a story are, how to escalate them dramatically, and where and how she wants to bring the story to an end - but she's amazingly flexible about the details of how she gets there, and that's where she listens to where her characters want to go.

There are a lot of story markets out there that talk about how they look for "character driven" stories. This is opposed to "plot driven" stories. I find that if I don't care about a character, I don't care about the story. This is something different from disliking a character. I can hate them, as long as I care about what happens and whether they get what they want or not. The decisions the character makes, and the actions the character takes, must critically affect what happens in the story, particularly the final outcome. Yes, there's room for external influences - attacks, or natural disasters, or simple bad luck - but these have to be present in conjunction with the character's goals and drives, or the story will just feel like a lot of meaningless stuff happening.

The idea of goals and stakes for a character is independent of the choice of first or third person point of view, or degree of narrative distance. A story usually has a character trying to achieve something, or trying to make some kind of decision. The character is our guide to how to feel and understand the world in which he or she moves.

Love them or hate them, we need to care about our characters.

More on hypergraphia and writer's block

After my post called "Insanity and Creativity" was featured on the SF network site "Red Rocket Station," I had a few interesting comments there, most of which said something like the following:

Hypergraphia? Can I please have some?

Really, I don't think these people want hypergraphia. I mean, the Marquis de Sade apparently had hypergraphia, which is why when people took his quills away he found all kinds of awful ways to keep writing. Hypergraphia is an obsession with writing, where you'll write on anything, with anything, just for the feeling of the writing and the words coming out.

What I think these people really want is to avoid writer's block.

Janice has a great post on writer's block on her blog, here. Maybe she and I are just fortunate, but we never feel like we have writer's block - at least, not per se.

For me the question of not being able to write boils down to three major factors.

One: having no time to write
This is not writer's block. I get frustrated because often I'll have thoughts flying through my head but I won't have a moment to sit down alone at the computer and actually get them down. Sure, sometimes I use a little notebook. Mostly - and my friends will attest to this, Janice particularly - I corner someone and talk my ideas out. Talking ideas out helps me to solidify them, to test their relevance to what I'm writing and see how they fit into the story structure as a whole.

Two: being too exhausted to write
This happens, far more often than I'd like. I get so underwater with all the other demands of my life that the words just go to sleep. Often I'll think of sitting down to write, and then decide other priorities have to come first. And then something unexpected will happen. And then it will be the weekend. And then the kids will have the day off school on Monday or something. And pretty soon I'll find that I haven't written for days. It takes a while before I can wake up the system after that. So I edit. I read what I've written. I read what other people have written. I take a Ridiculously Close Look at something. All of these things help to wake up my drowsy Muse.

Three: being stuck on a story problem
Okay, so let's say I'm writing along, and suddenly I run out of things to say. The scene, which seemed to be going so well, just peters out. Or the novel starts losing momentum. That's when I know that something is wrong. It's not writer's block, because it's not something that's wrong with me. Something is wrong with the story. I call this a story problem. Generally speaking, a story problem turns out to be a question I haven't answered properly. Maybe I don't really understand the main character's state of mind in this scene (this is why I'm fanatical about writing in chronological order). Maybe I don't understand the motives of the peripheral actors in the scene. Or maybe I haven't really thought through how the logistics need to work. It's always something practical: some detail I've missed, or some angle I haven't considered. Usually the problem isn't even in the place where the writing started to get slow. Two days ago I got stuck writing a conversation between two people on page 224. After lots of thinking and several conversations on the topic with different people, I realized that in order to solve the problem, I had to go back to page 208 and think through every detail of my main character's state of mind, specifically, what models she was using to understand her situation and how and where these changed and developed. Once I could track that, I could go back and understand how she would interpret something in the tricky conversation. And voilà, today I'm starting on page 232.

Mind you, I believe in writer's block. I wouldn't say it doesn't exist. But I would encourage you to think through the reasons why the words aren't coming out right now. If it's no time to write, take notes and go back later. If it's exhaustion, take your time and do other things to wake your Muse up rather than banging your head on your notebook or computer. If it's a story problem, use whatever means you can - research, conversation, brainstorming exercises, structural revision, etc. - to address the issue, making sure not to blame the problem entirely on the area where it occurs, but to look earlier in the manuscript for possible sources of the problem.

Then maybe you won't need those hypergraphia pills that someone was asking me for.