Fighting With Your Characters

Hey kids.   As a way to get this ol' ball rolling once again, I thought I'd share a little more about the process of being a writer and some of my recent experiences while working on my upcoming novel Hurricane Carolina.  You'll notice the title of this post is "Fighting With Your Characters."

The subtitle should be "Or How to Finally Realize You're Just Being a Dumbass."

One of the great parts of being a writer of any degree is that your imagination is the only true limit to the people and places you can create.  The flip side of that is also that if you, at least in my opinion, do your job right and create deep and complex characters you run the very high risk of having them become a little too real on you sometimes and suddenly this fictional person or that group of fictional people you've created have their own story to tell that may not exactly be what you had planned from the outset.

And no, before you call the guys in the padded van with the specially fit strappy-jackets, I've not gone around the bend and started talking to the voices in my head.

Yet.

I'm sure a little more exposition may be in order here before someone tries to up my dosage, possibly involuntarily.  As I've been working on HC for the past six months or so I've developed a very long and complicated narrative with some fairly deeply constructed characters.  I finished the first draft of the book in a barely readable form in December to the tune of around 800 pages.  Yeah, 800 pages.  It's okay, I said 'Holy Shit' too.  The problem I had is that for some reason I just didn't like the story in that form.  It didn't seem 'real' enough to me to be believable. I sort of pride myself on writing characters that get a reaction from my readers, even if it is vehement hate as in the case of Mack from Bounce.  I'll take what I can get.  The problem here though is that I just didn't buy the story, particularly the ending.  It felt forced and crappy and left me ready to throw the whole damn thing in a drawer and pull it out six years from now after another book does well. 

Wait, I did that with By Design.  Damn.

And then the crazy happened.  I was driving down the highway on my way back to my house last Sunday afternoon when an epiphany hit me hard enough to make me pull over to the side of the road.  It wasn't that the story sucked (well not totally anyway).  The problem was that I wasn't telling the story that THOSE PARTICULAR CHARACTERS had to tell.  I know it sounds a little clown shoes but what I've been fighting with so hard all this time is trying to create a relationship for two characters that moved toward a predestined ending when what I should have been doing is "listening" to them to start with and letting them tell me their story the whole time.

Robert E. Howard had it right after all I guess.  If he could let Conan tell him all his tales of high adventure who am I to deny a couple of knuckleheads out of my imagination their say so?

So there you have it aspiring fiction writers.  When you're characters speak, listen.

It might just save you 600 pages of really good trunk novel nonsense.