Writing Wednesday: TRUST YOUR CHARACTERS

I recently went to a talk by Victoria Curran of Harlequin on writing for her line. One of the things she talked about was the frequent problem of writers trying to follow formulas and ending up short-changing the story, the emotional impact, and the characters themselves. I was really impressed to hear her say a lot of things about romance formula that I have said myself. TRUST YOUR CHARACTERS, she said. Let them lead you to interesting plots.Let them lead you to new places that other romances don’t go.

I have been thinking for almost a week now about this idea of trusting your characters and what that means for writers. I know that we have this idea that there are writers who outline and writers who discover. But I am not sure this is really a different thing. I suspect that writers who discover-write can have just as many problems forcing characters to do what will lead to the “right” plot as writers who outline do. And writers who outline can outline based on character rather than based on the “right” plot as much as discovery writers do. It’s not really one way or another, once you have written fifteen drafts of a manuscript. You are moving back and forth between plot and character, tweaking character so plot works, and tweaking plot so character works.

That said, I still like the idea of trusting your characters to lead you to interesting plot. I think sometimes we are scared to let our characters veer off script. Even if you don’t have an outline written down for a particular novel, you still have an idea in your head of what is done and what isn’t done in your particular genre. And when a character might have a chance to do something that you have never seen a character do before, as a writer you might have a tendency to reel that character in because you will have an easier time writing the next scene and indeed the rest of the book if the character stays within the kinds of plot that you have seen done before.

For instance, if you have a character in a fantasy novel who decides to leave the magical school s/he is enrolled in, what happens next? That’s not the way those stories are written. If you have a character in a romance novel who decides to leave town just when things get hot and heavy on a year-long world cruise, well what next? You don’t usually have a year gap before the resolution of your romance. If you have a character in a science fiction novel who does something stupid and gets killed, well then who is going to be your main character for the rest of the novel? You put a lot of time and effort into developing this great alpha character and now all you have left is the beta characters running around.

But often the most interesting thing about a novel may be the ways in which it disobeys the formulas and rules of convention. Yes, there are probably rules you can’t circumvent. In romance, do you have to have a happily ever after? Well, actually no. I’ve read romances that didn’t. But readers are not always happy. Still, it can be done and if your characters demand it, then you may end up writing a much more satisfying story that way than by making your characters act in ways that serve the HEA, but take away all the uniqueness and power of the character development you have worked on.

Still thinking about this …