I’ve still got the “my characters are cardboard” accusation in my head.
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| Hey, you! Up there at the keyboard. This is NOT working for me. Photo by Denis Defreyne via flickr |
Let me recap for those of you late to the party: I wrote a blog post about an article I’d read in which the author said, “if your characters aren’t talking back to you, they’re cardboard.”
I suppose we can forgive him for thinking it. It seems a natural human tendency to ascribe rightness and goodness to our own actions, while laying the opposite at the feet of the “different.” But I lashed out against the idea that if my characters don’t behave the way other authors’ characters do, they’re not fully developed.
I was chastised by the author of the article in the comments section, and I suppose that stung; maybe that’s why the issue stuck with me.
In thinking more on it, I find that I simply do not understand the idea of characters talking back to an author. And if they do, it seems to me, it would indicate the opposite of what everyone seems to think it does.
At a Space Coast Writers Guild conference several years ago, I sat in on a lecture by Dean Wesley Smith and his wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch. A fellow writer asked Dean if any of his characters ever refused to do what he wanted them to do.
This is standard language at writers conferences and group meetings. It’s as if it’s a rite of passage to be able to smile and let everyone know that you’ve finally created characters that butt heads with you. That’s how you know you’ve made it; you’re a real writer now.
Well, Dean smiled the same smile I had on my face and told the guy, “No.” He’d never had that happen. He told us all that he is the writer. Of course the characters do what he tells them to do. They have no choice. That’s all paraphrased from hazy memory, of course. But I remember it still. It was nice to hear someone else say what I had always felt.
And, unlike some, I would never tell a writer that he is wrong to imagine his characters are talking back to him, or refusing to do what he writes for them. I just don’t understand it, that’s all.
My characters are real to me. Actual creatures, not always human.
In third person, I am a hidden observer. I am their god, in a way, but they do not know that I exist. At all. If they spoke to any gods it wouldn’t be me. It would be the gods of the worlds that I am observing. And they wouldn’t tell that god that he’d written it wrong and they just weren’t going to do that scene. They are real people, living their lives in a real world.
In first person, I channel one of them. I almost am them. But they are real and distinct from me. Yes, I am still their creator, but again, I’m not their god. They don’t know I’m there.
And there is the problem, as I see it.
If my characters spoke to me, it would be out of character (ah, a pun). It would be bizarre. It would be unnatural. It would be as if they were not real at all, but only actors, pretending to be the characters in my play.
My characters are real people. I observe them. Or I channel them. But they don’t know I exist. Why would they ever speak to me?
So, now I’m wondering…is it a god thing?