"My Characters Surprise Me"

Quite often in fiction writing, I hear someone observe that their characters surprise them. Some writers regularly talk about their characters as if they were independent people, whose actions the writer can't predict.

Personally, I find this slightly annoying: it's rather twee, and gives strength to the false impression that the writer is a sort of conduit through which the story flows, as if the writer's brain isn't controlling the story so much as surrendering to the spirits like a medium. Writing is, I think, a craft, and as such can't be done well by either a mechanical process or subconsciously. The correct method lies somewhere between the two.

(And don't get me started on people who talk endlessly about how awesome/messed up their characters are. First, they're not real, and, second, I don't care.)

However, while I'm never going to like the idea, I can actually see what people mean when they say that their characters surprise them.


Chekov's Gun, In Reverse

Might come in handy later

 

In a novel, it's a pretty basic rule that the characters can't and shouldn't do things that they wouldn't  concievably do. You've probably heard of Chekov's Gun: if the audience are told that there is a gun hanging on the wall, they will expect it to be used. This cuts the other way, too: if the story requires a gun to be produced in Act 3, it should be clear before then that it is possible that this might happen.

So, characters and events shouldn't happen that are completely unexpected, even if that expectation is only one of a number of possible outcomes. In that way, characters are predictable (or at least should operate within a range of predictable outcomes), and shouldn't be surprising the writer by suddenly acquiring abilities and histories that weren't hinted at before.

(I suppose I could imagine a story where a character acted wildly out of character, but I would expect the emphasis of the story to be about discovering why they did that. One example might be a mild-mannered man becoming a terrorist, or a spy being revealed as a double agent.)


A Range of Choices

That said, just because a character behaves in a certain style, that doesn't mean that there's no room for choice. When confronted with a large group of enemies, a veteran soldier might decide to attack, fall back, or just give up: depending on the circumstances, all of these might be decisions that that man might reasonably have made. And sometimes the author decides that one reasonable decision is better to the one that he'd originally planned to use.

Attack!

I think this is what writers mean when they say that their characters surprise them. You reach page 110, when Sergeant Jones is about to die bravely in a hail of bullets, and realise that, actually, it's much more powerful if he decides to surrender and the enemy shoot him anyway.


The Result

Of course, the writer has to be able to deal with the resulting fallout and its effects on the story. The murder of Sergeant Jones means that the enemy now look much more evil to the reader, and the reader is likely to want more payoff as a result. It's important not to lose your grip on the plot or the tone, or to let things done on a whim derail the novel. Because ultimately, no matter what your characters may or may not "decide" to do, it's your book.

How Not To Stop

I wrote a post a while ago about deciding what you were going to write about, and what form that writing was going to take. Even if you're certain that your idea deserves 70,000 words or more, and you're enjoying writing them, there are going to be points where the book feels like a slog, and the writing seems to be something you need to plough through to get to the next interesting bit. Below are some ideas of how you can keep going. As ever, they work for me, but your mileage may vary.


1. Identify the "way points" along the route

A row of peaks, somewhere or other.

If you have any idea of what is going to happen in this novel (which you should have) you'll know that there are certain important scenes that have to be included. Pirates arrive on Danger Island; the dog falls down a ravine; Anne and Julian argue about George. What you're writing isn't a single long slog from A to Z: much of the time you're working towards the next point of excitement - hangliding to the next peak, if you like. If you can break it up like that, it looks like much less of a struggle.


2. Can you skip ahead?

When I wrote Straken, I was working to a time limit. I needed to be producing 500 words a day, if not more (and for someone writing to order, that's a fairly lenient time frame). The option to just stop and wait for inspiration wasn't there.I found the easiest way to keep going was to jump ahead to the next part whenever I got stuck. This worked because I had a pretty good plan from which to work, and was able to resume the story at a later point without worrying that doing so would damage the stuff I'd already written.

Of course, this can leave you with some awkward gaps in the text, which you have to go back and fill. Filling gaps is never the most fun element of writing. But, if you're looking at the book as a set of connected "way points", when you go back, you'll probably be working towards another way point, and hence will have something exciting to aim for. Of course, if it still seems dull, you need to ask yourself...


3. Do you actually need this bit?

And when exactly is this happening?

This can be a very difficult question to answer. Ideally, everything that happens in a novel both moves the plot forward and develops the characters of the protagonists, preferably while upping the stakes. Sometimes it only does one of these things, and it's necessary to make the decision whether or not to keep it in.

Say two characters are going to assassinate a politician. Do we need to learn about the journey they took to the politician's house? Maybe we do, because on that journey they discussed their motives and an important realisation was made. Or perhaps the technicalities of the assassination are very difficult, and so their discussion will give the reader an idea of what needs to happen for the assassination to occur (and which then goes completely wrong). But maybe the journey is just there to pad out the word count. In a way, this is a bit like the question of where you begin a story.

However, too much cutting and the story loses its flow. One of the (many) flaws in Prometheus was that there was no way of knowing how long it was all supposed to be taking. The ship landed on a planet, some things happened to various people, perhaps at the same time, and it all ended. My suspicion is that it was heavily - and unevenly - cut. The best plan, I think, is to cut, but to save what you cut just in case you cut too much.


4. Don't ask for permission to keep writing

I've seen this on forums and in writing groups: a person writes a chunk of their novel, then puts it up for comments before writing the next bit, effectively asking for permission to continue with it. I suspect that this is an easy habit to get into, and it's probably rather comforting to know that nobody you know has told you that it's rubbish yet.

I think this is a bad habit. It risks the writer working for approval of a group that may not represent the world at large and probably doesn't represent the writer himself. At the extreme, it's not much different from saying "I want to write about a wizard: please tell me what to say".

Discovering what you can and can't do is important. If you are going to be original, you need to write about what matters to you, not what a committee approves. Of course, you'll have to write it well, but that's another story (so to speak). The important thing is that you're writing at all.

Passive Characters and the Passive Voice

People sometimes talk about avoiding "the passive" in writing, but the expression tends to be used to refer to a couple of things.

First, passivity in a character is what it sounds like. A passive character is one that things happen to. The character doesn’t take action or make decisions: he is just affected by stuff. To use modern jargon, he has no agency. I sometimes suspect that one of the main differences between literary and genre writing is that a lead character in a literary novel is much less likely to be dynamic. 

Generally speaking, passivity in characters is hard to warm to. Characters who are dynamic are more appealing to read about, because they move the plot forward. My own feeling is that, unless you are going to do something very clever, writing about a character who is fundamentally passive – a man locked in a cell, for instance – is a risk. Of course, once the man is working out a way to escape from the cell, he’s no longer passive any more…

Second, however, the Passive Voice is something different, as in the criticism that a writer is using too many “passive verbs”. "Voice" tells you whether the subject of the sentence is doing the verb, or having the verb done to them.

The passive voice is the opposite of the active voice. “I hit Bob” is active, because the subject of the sentence, me, is doing the action, namely hitting Bob. “I was hit by Bob” is passive, because the subject of the sentence, still me, is being affected by the action, namely being hit by Bob. However, note that “Bob hit me” is active. Although the people in the sentence have swapped around, Bob is now the subject of the sentence and is doing the action in the verb (the hitting). “Bob was hit by me” is passive.

And now, to really complicate things... Passive voice is not a tense. A tense tells you when something happened, not whether the event was caused or affected the subject of the sentence. The passive voice is easily confused with the pluperfect tense because it often includes the word “was”, as in “I was hitting Bob”. Here, despite the use of “was”, the sentence is still active, because "I", which is the subject of the sentence, is doing the hitting. If this sentence was in the passive, it would probably be “Bob was being hit by me”.

 Be wary of lapsing into the passive voice too much. It is often used in official documents to add a false level of grandness to proceedings, but is prone to vagueness and lacks dynamism. Overusing it won't destroy a story, but it will rob it of a degree of immediacy and accuracy, probably for no real gain.