JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #27
November 19, 2020
You often hear about writers who say that their characters surprise them and take over the story, directing it to unexpected places. I think this is the experience primarily of "discovery writers," those writers whose process is defined by not knowing what’s going to happen, for whom the act of writing is an act of discovering the story. In that case, it makes sense that the writer will profess a circumstance in which characters seem to direct their own outcomes.
I prefer to think of story and character as being inextricably linked. If you come up with a character first, the next step is to find out what that character’s story should be. If you come up with a story first, then you have to find the character who can fulfill the needs of the story. A good story is based on a series of cause-and-effect decisions, and only a character who would make that particular series of decisions can be the protagonist of the story. If you want to tell the story of “Hamlet,” you can’t just shove Odysseus into the role of the Prince of Denmark.
In my own experience, it seems to me that stories and characters arise in tandem. Knowing the plot, or knowing the character, leads me to the full picture of the story. The plot demands a character and a character demands a plot. I always know, if not the precise contours of the ending, at least the outcome of the story. I know how things will turn out because a story is incomplete without an ending. Plot and character are linked to their outcome, to the complete arc of the story, and all of the integrated pieces, are required.
This is not to say that, having the complete story, there is nothing to discover along the way. Writing for me is not boring, a mere paint by number. Even if I know everything that needs to happen and who the character is and what they will do, the excitement comes from seeing it burst into life as the words get laid down. Unexpected details emerge. Depths can be plumbed for their nuances. For the most part, however, I’m almost never surprised by what my characters do.
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