In a recent article for LitHub, Brandon Taylor wrote about his rejection of advice he received from other people in his MFA program. They told him to basically torture his characters to raise the stakes in his writing*. Taylor didn’t like their advice. His preference is for quieter stories of observation. He then goes on to talk about other observational writers, but I started to wonder about what goes on in a writer’s brain when they’ve got characters but no plot for them to act in.
Perhaps it’s my early exposure to the lively characters in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series**, but I love to imagine unruly characters refusing to follow the dictates of the author who thought them up in the first place. (This may be the only part of the writer’s process I’m actually interested in.) I love to think about authors conjuring up characters and giving them things to do. Thinking back to my own NaNoWriMo years, I can recall characters who didn’t do much when I put them on their stage or they would turn into Mary Sues—in which case they still didn’t do much because I am very much an introvert and very unlikely to do anything that would lead to adventure. I could create settings and back stories; it was the character psychology and plot (oh god, the plot!) that I really struggled with.***
All of this is to say that I am very grateful to authors for the wrangling they must have to do to get their characters to do what they’re supposed to, whether or not it involves throwing awful things at their characters or just putting oneself into the characters head to see what they might think in their setting and situation. Many of the books I’ve read lately—Jen Beagin‘s novels and Casey Plett’s Little Fish, in particular—have made me marvel at the knowledge authors must have and the work they have to do to create characters so realistic that I feel like I might bump into their characters in real life. Perhaps aspiring writers should take psychology courses in their programs. A few classes of psych might be better for writers than advice from MFAs who just want to abuse their characters, like ants under a microscope.
* This reminds me of a perennial bit of advice from the NaNoWriMo forums. If your plot isn’t going anywhere, add ninjas!
** I know I talk about this series a lot, both on this blog and in real life. This is because everyone needs to read at least the first three books in the series yesterday.
*** After a bad year, in which I wrote drivel even more embarrassing than usual, I swore off writing creatively and swore just to be a reader and book reviewer.
This is an excellent topic to think about. I too wrote my first novels for Nanowrimo. I sketched out the plot of the first book beforehand, but the characters took over and derailed the whole story (in a good way). After that, I didn’t outline any plots. But I knew the characters had something in store for me. This made for surprising stories, but I’m now that I’m rewriting them—fixing inconsistencies and holes, etc—I wish I had planned better. By the way, I really didn’t set out torture them. They did all themselves, the masochists.