thoughtfulThis explains a lot. Thanks for sticking it out this far. Our thought for today:
Thoughts on Writing #44: I Don't Gotta Like You To Love You.
Context is also love. Bearing that in mind, here's today's expanded thought:
You don't have to like your characters. You just have to stay true to your characters. I may not appreciate the fact that Shaun insults Mahir's wife on a daily basis, but it's what the character would do, and I'm not going to change him just because I don't approve of his behavior. Some people will assume you approve of everything your characters do. Try to learn tolerance. Also, don't punch them.
In the course of writing a story or book, authors will very often need to write about people they don't particularly like. Sometimes those people will be the heroes, sometimes they'll be the villains, and sometimes they'll just be spear-carriers, but they're going to exist. So how do we handle it? More, how do we handle the real people who assume that, just because we wrote about something, we must believe it/agree with it/support it in real life? It's time to talk about the times we clash with the people in our heads, and how we deal with all the consequences that come after.
Ready? Good. Let's begin.
Being Real Means Being Stubborn.
The goal of every good author is to create characters so real that they feel like people, not just words on paper. We want our readers to feel like the people they're reading about do stuff in the space between chapters (which also avoids awkward questions like "when does he go to the bathroom, anyway?"). This means that they're going to have likes and dislikes, quirks and habits, which may or may not match up with your own. And therein lies the problem.
A lot of people assume that when a writer tells a story, we're actually writing thinly-veiled self-insertion fanfic about ourselves. That, at the end of the day, we really want to be our characters. I'm sorry to be the one to say this, but, well...bullshit. I do not want to be any of my characters. Most of my characters, given the opportunity, would happily slaughter me, and leave my body as a warning to other authors who might be considering the sort of shit I like to pull. Seriously. These are not my "alter egos." They're my fictional murderers, and they'd love the opportunity to reduce me to my component parts. Also, I don't want to live in the worlds I've created for the vast majority of them. Just no.
So no, I don't like all the things my characters like, or want all the things my characters want, or believe all the things my characters believe. There's a little bit of me in each of them, because that gives me a hook into their behavior—and, I admit, because the process of creating a believable person often involves a lot of research, and I always fall in love with the things I research. So by the time I finished writing Chasing St. Margaret, I was very much in love with the London Underground, even though I'd previously been fairly neutral, and the more time I spend writing Alice Price-Healy, the more I consider getting a tattoo. But I do not share Margery's love of tea, or Alice's belief that a shotgun makes a good teddy bear. I am thankful for both these things.
Not sharing all their likes and loves means not sharing all their dislikes, either. Verity hates public transit with a passion. I do not. Toby is not a fan of horror movies. I am. And so it goes.
So We're Not Our Characters. Why Does This Matter?
The fact that we are not our characters matters because, if you have a character do something unpleasant, you will eventually be asked to explain why they did the unpleasant thing...and the odds are very good that you'll be asked to explain it as if you condoned it by writing it down. There will always be readers who believe that, by committing words to paper, you have said "yes, yes, this is good and true, and as things should be."
Thankfully, this is not the case, or the vast majority of us would be sociopathic killers, but the idea persists all the same. As writers, we need to keep in mind that a) people will assume that we are our characters, and b) we will agree with everything our characters say. Especially the offensive parts. The offensive parts are key.
Be tolerant. Be graceful. And remember, committing assault never got anybody a movie deal.
October 18 2010, 08:15:58 UTC 6 years ago
Similarly, while I do put a bit of myself into all my characters, I don't agree with them necessarily, and not about everything. Villains especially, though there *are* times when I get angry enough to ponder how to make airborne ebola to wipe out humanity. I never would, even if I had the skills, but there are times it's fun to think about such things.
And yeah, most of my 'verses I wouldn't want to live in, either. My main fantasy storyverse is full of angry gods and scary fucking monsters, and villains out to destroy half the goddamn omniverse (not just one universe, but millions!) just so they can utterly control the other half. Some of the things in that universe would have terrified H.P. Lovecraft. Yeah, there's equal amounts of equally epic goodness and beauty, but fuck no I won't go there, and I hope to Gods that storyverse isn't real and never will be real because I think we'd all be majorly fucked if it were.
And another storyverse... while there are worse things than a universe where human beings are the only organic sentient life in the entire galaxy, and all the other hundreds of sentient life forms are machines left over from organic civilizations that went extinct (most of those machine intelligences are halfway decent people!), I don't think I'd want to live there. Even though I *do* wish I could be a machine intelligence, so I could live for thousands of years and not have to eat or sleep or use the bathroom anymore, and not be made of fragile meat and bones.
About the only storyverse I'd want to live in (there are some I'd visit, but not live in) is the Traipah storyverse. Incidentally, it is the only storyverse where I *do* agree with a lot of what the characters' society in general does... Traipah is basically my ideal world and the Ah'Koi Bahnis are my ideal people. Still, even there, there are a lot of things characters do that I disagree with, often done for plot development and drama. And furthermore, Traipah is only one world in that storyverse; there are hundreds or thousands of known worlds there. And more than a few of those other planets I wouldn't even want to VISIT, let alone live at. (One in particular, Vennix III, I don't even want to be in the same solar system as that planet!) Even as much as I envy about Nokwahl, I wouldn't want to be her. She's a projective empath with enough pain and PTSD in her life from having been raped and nearly killed as a child that she uses her projective empath gift as a self-defense weapon.
Excellent post. I emailed the link to a friend of mine. She wrote about it here: http://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.c
October 18 2010, 20:42:00 UTC 6 years ago