Scrolling through TikTok’s array of writing experts, and trying to absorb their tips about character development, I’ve become increasingly baffled. Their advice bears no relation to my own experience. I’ve never used a white board or a flow chart, never listed personality traits or ginned up a biography, complete with childhood traumas. In fact, I believe that real writers have all their characters already inside them, fully formed but inert. The act of writing brings them alive and leads them out of the shadows, with no analytical thinking and technical trickery required. You just need to trust your unconscious mind, which does most of the heavy lifting, anyway.
All my favorite
characters have ambushed me, wrenching the narrative into a new direction which
turned out to be the inevitable way the story was meant to unfold from the
beginning. Who knew? Not me. A runaway 16-year-old boy named Rickey Muller
upended my new thriller “White Crow” … and
then somehow became the crucial centerpiece of the plot and the novel’s moral compass.
I fought it for a while, but finally I
was smart enough to give in. His traits, his biography, his “character arc”?
Those I discovered in the course of the book, just as the reader will. Rickey
led the way; I just paid attention. This somewhat nerve-wracking renunciation
of control made the book more fresh and lively, with an improvisational edge
that I would have been hard-pressed to construct by will power and conscious thought.
The stigma of mechanical engineering, the smell of engine oil and metal
shavings, rises from that mass of online instruction -- all those computer
programs and structural guidelines, all those tricks and gimmicks and hacks.
Forget about them. Your characters are all inside you. Just let them out -- and
let them take over.
You’ll be glad you did
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