On handling unruly characters

[annathepiper]

I was asked the following question on Google+:

How do you deal with characters who suddenly hare off and do something you really REALLY didn’t plan?

This is an excellent question, and requires a bit of a longer answer than would fit comfortably into a social networking comment. So here, y’all get a blog post!

A lot of writers I’ve heard address this topic will swear up and down that YOU ARE THE WRITER, BY GOD, so you, not the character, are the one in charge of a character’s actions in a story. From what I’ve seen these tend to be people who have more active plans in place before they start a book, so they’ve got clear ideas at all times of what they expect a character to be doing. Maybe they’ll even have a full outline sketched out.

Me, I’m not quite that much of a pre-planner. I’ve completed four manuscripts to date, and am about to complete a fifth. So far, my way of doing this is to have a general broad picture of what the book’s supposed to be about, going in. This is very similar to how I used to do plots in my days of playing MUSHes, where we’d do things called ‘tinyplots’–i.e., a general broad, open-ended idea of a plot concept–and then the characters on the game would then roleplay the plot out. It’d often go in unexpected ways due to the live, real-time nature of the RP, and that was a known and expected thing and considered to be part of the fun.

Now that I’m writing, I go in with that same broad idea of how the plot should work and some core character concepts for the major members of the cast. I start writing, and maybe I’ll get in a few chapters or so and then take a step back and think, “okay, now what happens next?” I’ll do a little bit of planning, then write that bit, and then do a little bit more planning, lather, rinse, repeat, until the book’s done. I’ll usually be taking notes in an outline file, with chapter summaries, as I go. It’s been a very organic process for me and usually it works.

However, sometimes I will have a character go HI I NEED TO DO THIS NOW, completely out of the blue. This is usually code, in my brain, for “Okay Anna, you haven’t thought something through well enough”–either my concept of what that character is supposed to be like, or else something about the overall plot. It happened to me early on, in fact, in the writing of the book that eventually became Valor of the Healer, and what I did at that point is to just readjust what I was intending to write in the chapters in question and keep going. I was still within the broad overall concept of what I wanted to do, so I wasn’t blocked.

But in another book I’ve got that’s still a work in progress, I hit a point where I realized that what I’d written so far just felt wrong. So in that case I just ditched that draft and started a new one. I was only four chapters in, so it wasn’t quite as severe a situation as having to completely trash most of a book.

How about the rest of my fellow writers out there? How do you deal when your characters raise their hands and go AHEM I’M DOING THIS NOW?

ETA: This post is attracting comments on its mirrors on Livejournal and Dreamwidth, so I encourage readers to check those out to see what a few of my other fellow authors are saying!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Comments

[mmegaera]

Charley was the world's most stilted and stiff character until I changed from third to first person, then he was like turning on a fire hose. Never did figure that one out, but whatever works.

Usually when I don't get it right, my characters stage a sit-down strike, rather than winging it. When they wing it, it's basically my back-brain's way of saying, "hey, this is a much better idea," and it usually is, so I've learned to go with it. When they stage the sit-down strike, it's time to go back, a scene at a time, till I figure out where the heck I messed up. I once lost almost half a book that way [sigh], back when I didn't have as good a grasp on what to watch for.

I write to what Lois Bujold calls the event horizon, then I plot again for a bit, then I write till I've run out of that batch of plot, then I plot some more, so forth and so on till I get to the end of the book. I usually start with a precipitating event and a character, and I either know the line/scene at the end pretty much from the getgo or fairly soon thereafter. I think that's my romance background rearing its head. For me, it's not wondering how it's going to end, it's wondering how we're going to get there that keeps me writing.

So yeah [g].

[annathepiper]

It sounds like you and I have very similar writing strategies. :)

And yeah, that sit-down strike thing, that's what happened to that WIP I mentioned.

[mmegaera]

You have no idea how relieved I was to find out that Bujold's writing strategy is very similar to mine (except that she plots in much greater detail than I do). It was really quite the validation that I was "doing it right" [g].

Here's hoping you can get your contract with your characters straightened out!

[annathepiper]

Yeah, it's very gratifying to hear when writers you admire are doing stuff the same way you are!

And hee, it wasn't even my characters being cranky at me, this time. This was just a question I happened to get asked by somebody reading me on Google+! This doesn't happen often, questions out of the blue like that, so I thought I'd devote a blog post to it.

[batyatoon]

While I've never done writing longer than a long short story and most of my current writing is in RP form, I've found when a character wants to do something you didn't plan on, there are only two options: (a) go with it, or (b) have something drastically interrupt the action. If (b) can't be managed plausibly and organically, then (a) is the only option -- and it's probably the better option regardless. I try to only use (b) if the consequences of (a) will be utterly disastrous in the non-fun way.

[annathepiper]

Very sane, on the whole. I've never had to do the Drastic Interrupt option, but then, having to back up and rewrite what I'm doing is pretty drastic too!

On the whole though I like the "just go with it and see what happens" option best.

[thnidu]

I rarely write fic, but I often write filk. And as I was reading this post, there slammed into memory this bit that I wrote years ago:

Inspiration

It is no tame bear
that will dance to your drum.
It will seize your hair
and command you to come.
You will sing of its dance
as well as you may
and it will, if it likes,
call you back some day.

[annathepiper]

Ha! Very apt. :) Nice!

[thnidu]

(smiles & bows) I'm glad you like it.