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I can remember quite clearly ploughing through pouring rain and a strong coastal wind one early morning to reach my favourite coffee house. Did I have an important meeting to make? Was I rendezvousing with a mistress? Was I stormed out of the house after a marital spit? No. I wanted to find out what my story character was going to do next. I had no ideas in my head, no plan. I had to sit down and wait for them to tell me what happened next.
Crazy. At least I thought so until I mentioned it to the guy who had run a Writing Group I went to a few years ago. He immediately said he was the same, he had no idea what was going to happen next in the story, had no plan laid out, and certainly not one of these chapter by chapter schemes that some writers swear by, even to the extent of knowing how many words they are going to end up writing.
It’s like that Alan Bennett quote – “You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.” (from The Uncommon Reader) only substitute ‘character’ for ‘books’. You sit in front of your computer and wait for them to speak to you. ‘Okay, writer, you’ve left me facing the big, bad guy, I’m unarmed, a History teacher by occupation; how the hell do I get out of this one?’ And he/she does. Somehow. And why does he do this, that, the other, end up with the blond when you intended him to marry the brunette? Because he is he. Or she is she. They make their own decisions. (I should add here that if you are not a writer and reading this, you have probably left the room by now, or should. Characters are real. Forget the fiction crap, bookshops knop nothing.
And when you finish a book? And decide not to use the same characters again? What then? Are they left in literary limbo? Or do they go on, living out their lives? Has my New York PI solved countless cases I will never know about? Or was he gunned down in the very next episode?
And even famous writers get tired of their characters. Author Conan Doyle, creator of one of the world’s most famous detectives, eventually came to view his popular literary creation as a burden. In 1891, just five years after the publication of A Study in Scarlet, the first novel to feature Holmes and his sidekick Watson, Doyle wrote to his mother: “I think of slaying Holmes…and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.”
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Despite James Bond’s success, Ian Fleming was ambivalent about his famous character. He called Bond a “cardboard booby” and a “blunt instrument;” once, he said, “I can’t say I much like the chap.”
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Tolstoy grew ashamed of having written War and Peace and Anna Karenina. This resulted from the “spiritual breakthrough,” when Tolstoy disowned all his earlier works for the sake of his new religious convictions.
So it seems our characters can become larger than life, or take on a life of their own. Or maybe we just bring to light a character who has always been there, just waiting to be written into a story and into our world.
It makes you wonder who is out there now, waiting to step onto the stage…? Oh, is that the time? I mkust hurry to the coffee house, someone is calling out to me…