Writing Update
Scenes Arranged: 1
Total Scenes: 22
This doesn’t sound like much, but I’m taking it as a personal victory that I got ANY scenes arranged last night after posting my blog since I posted it after 11pm. It’s highly unusual that I don’t start my day with my blog so I’m taking my victories where I can, which is important. It’s also important to then redouble my efforts, which is what I’m doing today.
Personal Update – Nothing since late last night. Rise and shine, people.
Discussion Topic – Letting Characters Take the Wheel
In 2017, a remarkable movie came out called The Man Who Invented Christmas. It was about Charles Dickens and his process in writing A Christmas Carol. One of the things I found interesting was the change in title in that it was originally Humbug: A Scrooge’s Lament and somehow ended up as A Christmas Carol. Although I haven’t gone through the publishing process YET, I have heard many stories about how original titles rarely make it to a published book’s cover. This seems to support that. I HOPE that my idea for the titles of my books across the series see the light of day because, frankly, I’ve gone through A LOT of potential titles over a decade and these just feel right.
That wasn’t what made the movie remarkable to me, though; it was Dickens’s conversations and arguments with his characters over what they were to do in the story. If you float around the author community for a while, you’ll hear about authors arguing with their characters too. For me, it’s a little more subtle, but that makes sense to me with my personality.
In my head, characters don’t stand up and revolt when I try to write them a certain way. They don’t stay my hand or refuse to show up. At the end of the day, I AM THE AUTHOR. However, they will bother me after I have written something out of character for them. And they don’t stop bothering me until I fix it.
One of my best examples is Meibor from earlier drafts. Originally, he joined my party by catching Grant unawares, putting a knife to his throat, and making a deal with him. Parts of that sound like Meibor, the catching and threatening. But the deal made no sense. And as skilled as Meibor is at being an assassin, he would have just killed Grant and taken what he was after. He wouldn’t have made a deal. He wouldn’t even have revealed himself. And the deal itself, to join Grant’s group, would NEVER have happened.
And I was damned until I fixed that because Meibor would not shut up about it. I kept having this weird, unsettled feeling that his story was supposed to take a different path. It was still to be interwoven with Grant’s, but never joining. It took me until my FIFTH draft to realize that I had to completely rewrite him. The result is that his character is acting as imagined now and the book itself is SO much better for it.
So characters can absolutely drive their own stories. Since I work in outlines as my first draft, much of the internal conversation with them comes in designing their scenes, but sometimes they pipe up later to fix things.
If you haven’t seen The Man Who Invented Christmas, you really should. Even if you’re not a writer, it is fascinating and entertaining. Plus, it’s about Christmas and that’s always a good thing.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG