Getting to Know You

During a mindless moment at the office last week, I clicked over to Chuck Wendig’s blog and discovered a lengthy post on character development. It was an informative and somewhat entertaining read (I find him unnecessarily crude, but his message often rings true), especially because I am currently disentangling Cristal from Shade and trying to get a handle on each of their stories. Nicole is also struggling with the voices of her latest fiction, so something must be in the literary collective consciousness to have inspired Chuck’s piece on characters.

As usual, I agree with some of what he says and disagree with the rest. Personally, writing is more about what feels good than what the experts advise. Creativity doesn’t have rules – or it shouldn’t. The business side insists on them, however, and that’s as frustrating as a natural talent being critiqued by an arts degree. I know someone who is a published writer in the real world, and she spends a lot of time adhering to editors, agents and pollsters to get where she wants to go. I envy her in some ways, respect her in all ways, and honestly wish her the greatest success – which I believe she will eventually have because she works so diligently at it. But I wonder, where in the process does she have any fun?

I digress. Back to character development. For me, a new character is like meeting a stranger. Either you click or you don’t. If you don’t click, then the relationship won’t work and you should each seek satisfaction with someone else. I cannot conjure a character from thin air. To me, that’s like building a robot – you’ll have the physical details in place and maybe some personality programmed into it, but at the deepest level, he will only ever be two-dimensional. Great for a formulaic genre, but not for me. I want feeling. I want emotion, conflict and drama. I want to bleed with my characters. I want to soar with them, love with them, hate with them, fight with them, die with them, give birth with them. I want to be scared with them, of them, and for them. I can’t do that with a checklist. Nope, characters come to me fully-formed and full of mystery. They know who and what they are. My job – my pleasure – is to discover who and what they are as I write about them. It’s slower than hammering out the top ten qualities and manipulating them into situations, but I prefer it despite my whining at how little I get done in a day.

Shade began as a cheerful sort, a bit mischievous and a lot mysterious – when Cristal was telling the story. When I switched to his point of view, I got a completely different take on him, and that’s how I knew he and she actually feature in two different stories. Now that I’ve split them up, she is still befuddled by a mischievous mystery man, and Shade is free to tell his different, darker tale. I didn’t know any of this when I started my angel story all those weeks ago. I learned it as I wrote, first about her, then about him. The secondary characters are introduced by the main. I write what I see and hear. I write what I am told, and if I have a question, I ask the character. What happened then? Why did you—? Who said—? Sometimes the answer surprises me, but I must trust that it’s accurate.

Only one character has ever outright lied to me. For many many years, I believed something that everyone else in the story had to believe, and that one character was responsible for duping us all. Her argument? “The scribe had to be deceived lest the secret be imperiled.” In short, I’m the weakest link!

Insulting as it is, the revelation presents grand potential for a new story down the road … when I am ready to let someone die.

Some stories I don’t want to tell.

There might be something to the cardboard cutout character after all.