My Character Made Me Do It!

[SkyBubble]

Fair warning, I'm procrastinating.

Something that occasionally pops up is a comment in a thread which says, basically, "I was doing X and then my characters made me do Y," or "My characters decided to do X, and it was so unexpected." Something like that, anyway.

And I read it and a little part of me goes, "grrrr!"

Come on, people! The characters are not real. They are figments. They might feel real, but they are imaginary. They have no agency. It's you. Your creativity made you do Y, not X. You went in the unexpected direction.

This should be celebrated, rather than masked with the 'my character made me do it' blurb.

Yes, I know we all know this, and yes, it isn't important in the scheme of things. But, yes, now I've got that out of my system I can go and find something other displacement activity. Have a nice day.

All true -- and I've had stories basically come to me, with developed characters and all. And yes, I've been writing and stopped suddenly, surprised, saying to myself, "Why did he/she do [say] that? That wasn't what I was planning." But it's right, so I stuck with it. My most recent story -- still in Pending (which I've ben working on since March) -- took a couple of different directions than I planned.

 

[SkyBubble]

I find when I'm writing - especially when I'm writing first person - that I tend to take on the persona of the main character (and sometimes the others, too), like an actor stepping into a role. There are times when I know where I, the author, wanted to take the story when I sat down to write. But then I'm writing, and I, the character, don't like what I the author came up with and I let the character take over and write what makes the most sense at the time.

I think this is pretty common in writers. I think it makes for a better story when you've got such a firm understanding of a character, what their motivations, likes, fears, kinks even, are that you can roleplay the part and despite having an omniscient perspective.

I've actually been moved to tears by something characters do.

 

[SkyBubble]

I'm well aware that it's ultimately me driving the stories I write, but I enjoy the process of discovery I can only go through by writing.

If I sit and think logically about where I want my story to go, or if I outline and plot, I might have a very clear idea about my plan. But then I sit and write and the story seems to take a turn, and I find myself writing the characters wanting things and doing things I hadn't initially planned for them. It can be disorienting and make the story harder to write, but it's honestly one of my favorite things about writing.

Is it actually my characters, in a literal sense, taking willful control of my story? No. But it's easier and more fun to say my characters didn't cooperate than, say, "I had a plan, but in the act of writing it didn't really click, so more work was needed to develop my characters properly to get them where I needed them to be, and ultimately I adjusted my plan." In so many words.

At least one of my stories was supposed to be "about" one character and turned out to be about another. As I developed the story, that aspect emerged more and more, and it's a much more interesting story that way.

 

[SkyBubble]

Fair warning, I'm procrastinating.

I haven't gotten around to that yet.

 

[Yogma]

As somebody who has indeed said that, I think I need to defend myself

I would concede the difference isn't so much "them" and "me", as it is between my conscious and unconscious mind. My conscious mind has a very clear and detailed plan of what my character should be doing and saying, but as I'm in the writing groove, my sub-conscious mind will sometimes step in and decide the character is doing something completely different.

I guess claiming the character did it, is better than having to admit my two conscious states aren't always in agreement with each other