Why aren’t my characters talking back to me?

The other day I read an article in The Washington Times by Jack Engelhard* called, “Dear Writers: Suppose your novel sucks?”

They’re supposed to do what? Photo by Kaibara87 via flickr

Engelhard* talks about having to shelve a novel that wasn’t working for him. Unfortunately he said a couple of things that struck a chord: an out of tune, alternative-metal, headache-intensifying chord.

He said of his bad novel:

The characters never talked back to me, never argued with me, never stood up for themselves, and when none of that happens, you’re writing cardboard.

I was shattered. I’ve been writing cardboard characters.

I still smirk when I hear novelists talk about how their characters have minds of their own, take off in their own directions, argue with them, tell them they absolutely will not do that. Are they crazy people? Of course they are. Do they not understand that these characters are figments of their own imaginations? Apparently not.

You are the writer, I’d say to myself. You control the characters. If you take them off on a tangent you don’t like, reel the story back in and take it where you want it to go. If it doesn’t feel right, something’s wrong. Maybe you’ve created a character you know, instinctively, wouldn’t do that. And if you force her to do it, it will read false.

But your character? Talking back to you? What…in your head? Don’t be silly. Many novelists have this idea that there is an air of mystery and art, and mysterious art, about writing. They talk about it like it’s ethereal and undefined, instead of the pure joy of creation and the hard work of craft.

And here is Mr. Engelhard telling me that because I am in control of my novel and my characters don’t talk back and fight with me, it’s not that I’m sane, it’s because they’re cardboard.

So, either one of two things is happening here:
1. Engelhard, and all those other crazy novelists, is right. My characters are clearly cardboard. Or…
2. Engelhard speaks only for himself, and all those crazy novelists. My characters are not cardboard. I just work differently.

I’m going to go with number two. For two reasons. First, I don’t like to think that my characters are cardboard. Who does? I honestly don’t think they are. They feel very real to me. They don’t speak to me, but they do indeed speak to others in the novel. They say and do things that I didn’t plan for them to say and do.

This isn’t “my characters coming alive and having minds of their own” like Frankestein’s creature. This is just the creative process. My mind creates the scene as I am writing it. I’m in charge.

And second, I think that I write in such a way that allows my characters to work on their own. I’m never trying to force them into any kind of box or situation that aggravates my creative process.

In other words, I work without an outline, or with an extremely loose one. (That sentence there opens up a whole new avenue of blogging controversy!)

I start a novel and get a few chapters in before I realize I don’t know where I’m going with the story. (Is this where I’m supposed to just plug along, forcing my characters to do things they don’t like to do?) So, to figure it out, I start what some people might call an outline. It doesn’t look like an outline. It’s more like a summary in sections.

Then I think about where I’d like this story to go–what might happen–what is it about…and then I put that into my summary in sections. And I go back to writing. I don’t pay all that much attention to what I’ve just put into my summary in sections, unless I feel stuck again. And by then, I usually have to change the summary to fit what I’ve written, never the other way around.

But all of the real work–discovering what the story is really about, finding my characters in troubling situations, having my characters become heroes, or victims, realizing how the story will end–all of that happens through either the creative process as I’m writing, or through the creative process as I’m daydreaming about my story.

So, my advice to novelists would be to stop trying to force your characters into what you think is the story. Put you fingers to the keyboard and, if your characters are real enough to you, you will be able to tell their story without fighting with figments of your own imagination.

The second thing Engelhard said seemed to contradict the first:

If you can change the names of your characters midway, you’ve got nothing going. You are inventing, not creating.

Well, hold up there. What if your character pops up in your head, as they are apparently wont to do, and says, “Why do you keep calling me Judy, dude? My name is Melissa. Do you mind?”

This all leads me to wonder what was really wrong with Engelhard’s story. Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

*Spelling corrected! Not only are my characters cardboard, but I’m ordinary minded, second-rate, and misspelled someone’s name! And now I’ve gone and used a bunch of exclamation points! Where will it end?

It’s what I deserve for calling authors crazy. Crazy, I tell you!

Forgive me, writer gods…