Writing In Character - You Have to Be There

By David Niall Wilson • May 4, 2009 • Comments (11) [Edit]

This past weekend I bought a book just for idea hunting.  The book is titled 101 Things Everyone Should Know about Science and it covers, in very short bursts, interesting scientific tidbits.  One that I read early on in the book is that all Navel Oranges in the world stem from a single tree.  It was a mutant tree that grew in Brazil in the 1700s, and all subsequent trees bearing that seedless fruit have been created by grafting on bits from the original tree and its descendants.  All very interesting, yada yada.

Here’s where my mind took it.  I started imagining myself sharing that factoid with a variety of different characters, and how they might react.  It got me thinking how it is that I “get in character” when I write.  It’s as if I am there - not really a part of the story, but there and interacting with real people.  Most of my characters are constructs built of bits and pieces of the people I’ve met, so the trick is to take those people and imagine how they’d react to whatever the elements of my story happen to be.

The Navel Orange.  One character might say that the tree was obviously grown through some sort of alien contact, and that we had perpetuated that alien life over the years by grafting it to trees all over California.  A more classically educated person might comment on how, in natural selection, such a plant would not be possible, and how if we allowed it the navel orange could disappear form the planet in the space of a couple of years.  A fanatically religious person might say we should not be altering the genetic makeup of what God has created, and that no good will come of it.  A lot of folks would just nod, shrug, and forget it the second you mentioned it.

The trick, then, is that once you have established how a particular character “is” you have to remain true to that decision.  If your story was supposed to hinge on a particular reaction, but the character you’ve created just would not react that way, then you have a problem, and the character wins unless you want to retro-engineer from the reaction and recreate the character.  Quite often my books have taken sharp curves or gone in different directions altogether because the character I created demanded it.

If you aren’t true to your characters, they will fall flat.  The points where they act “OUT” of character will be jarring and will irritate your readers…not to mention driving you crazy, because you’ll know.

To a point, you can plan far ahead enough to account for upcoming events, but it doesn’t always work.  In my novel Deep Blue, Dexter, the drummer, is sort of OCD.  He is obsessed with patterns.  I wrote that because it was fun, but later he was problematic. I considered changing him - but if I had listened to that devil-horned voice in my head and done so, then Dexter couldn’t have saved the day at the end of the book, and his back story, which turned out to be fascinating, would have been lost to me.

When people say fiction is either plot driven, or character driven, this is what they mean.  In my opinion, it is impossible to reach the same levels of intimacy with readers and the same level of intensity in your writing in a plot-driven story.  In one case you have a story telling a story - in the other you have people living it.  I go with people every time.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on it…and by the way, how do you react to the information about Navel Oranges?