Going Against Character

I’ve had this experience a few times now where I’ve been at a convention, either on a panel or in the audience at a panel, and the question of characters has come up. And the question is some variation on this: “Do your characters ever surprise you?”

And of course the answer is always some variation on “yes, they do”. Even writers who plan obsessively, as I do for certain types of project, don’t go into a story with their minds ready stocked with fully functioning automata of all their cast members. You work characters out on the page. You may know their arc and their plot function and their place in the story as a whole, you may even know their voice, but until you actually start to write you don’t really have more than the fuzziest idea of how they’re going to work.

A banal example of this is the character of Ben Rush in the second of my two Adam Blake novels (The Demon Code). In the plan he’s a middle-aged man, and he was set to die about halfway through the story. I actually got to the death scene, wrote it, read it back and thought “wow, that’s really inert”. Which is sort of an alarm bell: if even you don’t care what happens to a character, it’s a fair bet that your readers won’t either.

It took a while to figure out what was wrong with Ben, but in the end I solved most of the narrative problems I was having with him by making him young instead of middle-aged, gormless instead of grizzled, and completely out of his depth throughout the larger part of the book. He worked a lot better as a kid slowly figuring out what was going on in the female protagonist’s world. He didn’t work well at all as an older man with his own separate sphere of expertise – too much overlap with other characters like Tillman, Ber Lusim and Kuutma.

But coming back to those convention conversations – most writers say yes, their characters can surprise them. What matters most to me, though, is what they say after the yes.

Someone was talking to me on Facebook the other day about “complaint boasting”. A complaint boast would be something like “But god, you know, a Rolls Royce is so expensive to run. I’m starting to neglect the Bentley.” Or “Three weeks in the Caribbean sounds great, but you come back to such a full inbox!” It's usually subtler than that, but I'm sure you know what I mean.

And there’s a version of this “My characters surprise me” conversation that falls into exactly that mould. A writer will say: “My characters never do what I tell them to. They rebel against me and recreate themselves on the page.”

And what they’re really saying, it seems to me, is: “My talent is so huge, even I can’t control it.” It’s like they’re accidentally creating fully realised human beings even when they’re not trying to. Like their characters are so dense and so real, they’ll only agree to be in the novel on their own terms.

My instinct is to call bullshit on this, but what do I know, right? Maybe there are people whose talent works in exactly that way. All I can say for sure is that mine doesn’t.

Creating a character in a novel or a short story is always going to be a multi-stranded process. It’s not like creating a character in Dungeons and Dragons, where you roll dice for each attribute – strength, wisdom, charisma and so on. Or if it is, then you’re probably going to end up with a character who’s exactly as vivid and believable as Frognal the half-elf cleric, level 6, neutral alignment.

In a story, you start off with a rough sense of who the character is and where they’re going. You fill that out while you’re planning or roughing out scenes or doing whatever preparatory work you do, and then you hit the ground, start writing, and stuff starts to happen.

And yes, you CAN find, at that point, that Frognal the half-elf cleric has got a bit more going on than you originally realised. You can find that he’s fun to write, that he can be given interesting things to do in the key scenes, that you’re getting drawn into his point of view and that his point of view is a rewarding place to be.

In extreme cases, you have a character who starts off as a plot function, but then something catches fire and they turn into a member of the core cast. But that’s not the character renegotiating his or her contract on the fly, it’s your creative process. It’s you working on your story, and doing what all writers do when a story goes from being inside your head to being out in the world. It’s a good thing, sure – certainly better than the alternative, which is to stick to the plan and let the story die (characters and all) for lack of oxygen. And it’s wonderful when it comes out right. But it’s not a sign of spectacular artistry or uncommon genius.

One more example, and then I’ll shut up. There’s a character in The City of Silk and Steel – Anwar Das, the camel-thief. He doesn’t appear in the plan at all as a named character. He cropped up in a single chapter, one of the inset short stories, called The Man Who Deserved Death No Fewer Than Three Times. And we just loved the way that story came out. From the core conceit of a man telling desperate lies to save his life, we got a sense of the character as someone who’s so good at tall tales he could convince you to donate both kidneys to him. And when we threw him into the mix in a wider sense, and let him interact with the rest of the cast, it seemed to work really well. He was a good touchstone for the moral seriousness of Gursoon, the brutal directness of Zuleika, the honesty of Rem. He paid his way, and we were very happy to have him.

But he didn’t lock us in a broom cupboard and write his scenes himself. That’s not how it works.