A Bit About Character Honesty

[Night Herald]

So. I'm sure we've all written characters who go against our wishes, who refuse to conform to who we want them to be.

Is it better for us as writers to arrest these rebellious ones, or to let them roam free and inform the plot?

For my part, I'm quite the silly/delusional person. I think of all my characters as real in a sense, and grant them full autonomy. I find that if I just leave them alone they'll grow into somebody beautiful, and thereby influence the plot.

I'm very much a character-first sort of writer. Plot only interests me so far as it influences the people within it.

I wonder, what is your approach to character? Are they an afterthought or the main deal? Do they feel to you like real people, or are they but means to an end? How do you treat your story people?

 

[Madman Starryteller]

I see my characters in my space opera as equally important to the plot, at least for my main series. I have a strong plot idea in my head and I kinda want the characters to fulfill it, so they're on a short leash.

But for one of my other projects, about a space pirate, I have a character idea, someone who will have a lot of freedom in becoming who he wants. Though he has an adoptive daughter who might influence certain choices.

 

[Night Herald]

I see my characters in my space opera as equally important to the plot, at least for my main series. I have a strong plot idea in my head and I kinda want the characters to fulfill it, so they're on a short leash.

But for one of my other projects, about a space pirate, I have a character idea, someone who will have a lot of freedom in becoming who he wants. Though he has an adoptive daughter who might influence certain choices.

I have to say that your space pirate with the adoptive daughter sounds like such a delightful story. I can almost picture it just from that line. You should totally write it!

And there's another good point, the way characters influence one another. They do live their own lives, don't they?

I've had instances where a couple of characters became romantically entangled, quite without my consent. It becomes a question of going in with the spray bottle, or sitting back and watching the thing unfold. I'm forever in the latter camp. Even if I eventually have to break them up and make it as though it never were, you can learn so much about these people just by watching them in love.

 

[Naomasa298]

I'm sure we've all written characters who go against our wishes, who refuse to conform to who we want them to be.

Nope. Never have.

If I start writing a character and then look back at what I've written and think something like "Oh, this suggests a possible romance", I either write it out if I don't want it, or consider how to use that direction and build it into the plot. I'm not really a discovery writer, though.

 

[hirundine]

Happens to me sometimes. It's basically because the creative part of my brain keeps running in the background while the rest of my brain isn't paying attention.

 

[Night Herald]

Nope. Never have.

If I start writing a character and then look back at what I've written and think something like "Oh, this suggests a possible romance", I either write it out if I don't want it, or consider how to use that direction and build it into the plot. I'm not really a discovery writer, though.

Huh, interesting. I think you and I might be diametric opposites in our approach to writing. Fascinating. I know there are writers out there who take a far more authoritative approach than I do; my word is law type of shit. I mean no offense or to suggest your approach is somehow worse than mine, it's only interesting to observe the contrast.

I don't personally lord it over my characters or presume to know what's best for them. Again, I'm aware the language here suggests some kind of insult to people who write like you do, but that's really not intended. It's perfectly valid to do things the way you do, it just isn't for me.

I have always afforded my story people a degree of free reign. That's where I find the story, in what they do and feel and think when unsupervised. My method isn't great for producing finished works in a reasonable timeframe, but it does come with a lot of depth and juice. That's my approach not just to character, but writing generally; leave it be, it will bloom in time.

 

[Louanne Learning]

My characters must be real to me, and that means being true to themselves. If I come across something I've written that makes me think, "Well, he/she would not do that!" - then a change is required.

 

[Naomasa298]

I don't personally lord it over my characters or presume to know what's best for them.

I do take some objection to the way you put that. I don't "lord" it over them, I write to be as realistic as possible, given the flow of the story. Their development is something planned through the situations I put them in. Therefore, when I write a scene, I already know what they're going to be like at the end of it, and I write towards that goal.

The difference is how we plot stories. I plan situations with a strong conception on how my characters will end up feeling and thinking. You write situations and consider how your characters will react. Neither method is better than the other, and both can result in characters who feel real.

 

[Homer Potvin]

Characters aren't real.

 

[Louanne Learning]

Characters aren't real.

But we have to write them as if they were.

 

[Rigor Mortis]

Real isn't real.

If that's not helpful to the conversation, writing characters as if they were real raises the question of what one means by character and what one means by real.

 

[Louanne Learning]

what one means by character

What a good question! I guess it includes anyone/anything with sentience, human or otherwise

what one means by real.

believable?

 

[Naomasa298]

Characters aren't real.

Quite so. Thus, you have to write them to portray them as if they were, as far as possible. If the character is a committed carnivore, having him wake up one morning and decide that from then on, he was only going to eat quinoa, that's not going to work, unless you come up with a good reason. But it's fiction, so that reason could be that they were hit by an alien space beam.

They have no volition beyond what you write for them. That's why I never say a character speaks to me. It's me thinking "hey, that sounds right for this character based on how I've written them so far".

 

[Naomasa298]

Real isn't real.

If that's not helpful to the conversation, writing characters as if they were real raises the question of what one means by character and what one means by real.

Believability of action. It's fine if the character does something out of character, as long as you can make the reader believe that. You can write Hitler suddenly deciding to go off and be a nun, if you can make it make sense to the reader. If you write that it's because he liked the taste of Mussolini's ravioli, that might be stretching it.

But that doesn't address the fundamental question - is it the character directing how you write them and talking to you, or is it coming from you and your concept of what the character is and writing down the words? For me - the latter.

 

[Rigor Mortis]

What a good question! I guess it includes anyone/anything with sentience, human or otherwise

The most important character in what I want to read is that of the narrative voice. Everything else stems from there. When I sit to write, I aim for the pitch I need in the narration. Like method acting, only maybe less intense, less tortuous. The first couple of paragraphs take me forever, but the thing tends to flow thereafter when I've established what the character of the piece will be.

believable

Believability of action.

Consistency is not the same thing as real. Stories are more likely to be hyper-real, with elevated intensity. If a dude sat beside you in a pub and told you about his experiences fighting dragons, interplanetary travel, foiling diabolical plots to overtake the world, you might sit, listen and be entertained, but you're not believing one word of it.

I've said it til I turned blue in the face on old .org (I have pictures. Defintely a bluish tinge). The thing I find least believable in most stories is the notion of character arc, however that may be put across. That doesn't mean I want shallow characters like James Bond with the same shit-eating grin at start and finish. It's more that it's beyond my suspension of disbelief to accept that people change at fundamental levels through the stimuli provided by the author. Beginning-Middle-End can be completed without some gargantuan change in the outlook or functional personality of the characters.

As regards creating characters, I do try to understand who and what I'm writing, with in-story consistency, and then make them do the things I want them to do through the story. Frequently, things will emerge as I'm writing that make a better fit in my head. I might just go back and fundamentally change those characters who don't measure up, park them somewhere with an empty promise that I'll call on them when I have a project that better fits their profile.

 

[Naomasa298]

Consistency is not the same thing as real. Stories are more likely to be hyper-real, with elevated intensity. If a dude sat beside you in a pub and told you about his experiences fighting dragons, interplanetary travel, foiling diabolical plots to overtake the world, you might sit, listen and be entertained, but you're not believing one word of it.

If he did it once, I'd think he was drunk. If he did it *all the time*, then it's consistent.

Consistent is realistic, not real. That's modern literary sensibility and requirement. It's not always what I write, either.

 

[Night Herald]

I do take some objection to the way you put that. I don't "lord" it over them, I write to be as realistic as possible, given the flow of the story. Their development is something planned through the situations I put them in. Therefore, when I write a scene, I already know what they're going to be like at the end of it, and I write towards that goal.

The difference is how we plot stories. I plan situations with a strong conception on how my characters will end up feeling and thinking. You write situations and consider how your characters will react. Neither method is better than the other, and both can result in characters who feel real.

Objection noted. I may have come across a bit cheekier than I wanted, there. My bad. I phrased it like that for flavor's sake, I guess. I certainly don't mean to suggest your handling of characters is in any way tyrannical or wrong.

It seems you do things in pretty much the opposite order I do, which is very interesting to me. If I'm understanding it right, you build a scene and place characters in it, with a strong sense of where it's all going and how they will act. I tend to start from character and let the scene take form around them; I feel my way towards what scenarios and events would best shape their growth. It's a pretty hit-and-miss way of doing things, but it's what seems to work best for me. I've always been more interested in people than plot, and I guess that's why I lead with characters.

Characters aren't real.

They certainly aren't real people, but they're real... somethings. Real fictions. And I have to think of them as actual people when I'm working on them, because that's the only way I know to make them come alive on the page. I have to sort of trick myself into believing in them for the duration of a writing sesh, to pretend they have autonomy, to cast myself in the role of someone who's merely observing them and recording their hijinks. Things just seem to flow much better when I do that.