Wednesday, October 02, 2013

Do you get into your characters?

I don't know about you, but I know a book-in-progress is going to be good when the characters take over. Apparently, it's not just my characters who do that. Carolyn J. Rose is here today to talk about her characters and to answer these two questions:
Do you get into your characters?
Or do they get into you?

In case you haven't already met Carolyn, let me tell you a bit about her.

Carolyn J. Rose is the author of several novels, including Hemlock Lake, Through a Yellow Wood, An Uncertain Refuge, Sea of Regret, A Place of Forgetting, No Substitute for Murder, and No Substitute for Money. She penned a young-adult fantasy, Drum Warrior, and a cozy mystery, Death at Devil’s Harbor, with her husband, Mike Nettleton, author of The Shotgun Kiss. 

She grew up in New York's Catskill Mountains, graduated from the University of Arizona, logged two years in Arkansas with Volunteers in Service to America, and spent 25 years as a television news researcher, writer, producer, and assignment editor in Arkansas, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington. She founded the Vancouver Writers' Mixers and is an active supporter of her local bookstore, Cover to Cover. Her interests are reading, gardening, and not cooking.

(I'm totally with her on cooking!) Please welcome Carolyn J. Rose.

Do you get into your characters?
Or do they get into you?

Recently I was chatting with a group of writers and, at the risk of being told I should wear an aluminum foil helmet to block the signals, mentioned that there comes a point in my novels when I feel the characters try to take the wheel. They start suggesting plot twists and chance encounters, romantic interludes, comic moments, and dangerous dilemmas.

“You mean,” another writer asked in amazement, “your characters know you’re there?”

To me that was a no-brainer. Of course they do. And I have no problem with that, even though she seemed to feel I was breaking a cardinal rule of writing. Furthermore, it seems that I have no choice in the matter.

As I finished up the first draft of No Substitute for Maturity, the third in my Subbing isn’t for Sissies series, characters started suggesting scenes for a fourth book. I’ll take all the help I can get, even help from fictional folks, so I dutifully wrote these ideas on file cards. Will Allison learn to drive? Will Mrs. Ballantine perfect her routine for that Las Vegas reality show? Will Barb get a full-time teaching job? Will Dave propose? Will Cheese Puff have to deal with a rival for Lola’s affections?

Notice that I wrote the suggestions in the form of questions. That’s my way of telling my characters that I’m still the one in charge, the one who decides what gets on the page.

Meanwhile, the characters I developed for Hemlock Lake and Through a Yellow Wood are also haunting my dreams and invading my quiet moments. I have file cards for them, too. Fortunately—because there’s only so much room on my desk for stacks of file cards—characters from my other books seem to feel I left them in good places and so far they’re content to stay there.

I work at getting into my characters, thinking about their back stories, their skills and failings, their biggest hopes and fears, what they do if they hear a bump in the night, etc. Apparently while I was doing this my characters were getting into me.

What’s your experience with your characters? Leave a comment and we’ll put you in the drawing for the e-book of your choice from the ones I’ve written.

Thank you Carolyn - for the post and for giving away an e-book! Now, everyone...leave a comment, please.

16 comments:

  1. Helen, thanks for letting me join you. I'm looking forward to what other writers have to say about their relationships with their characters.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm right there with you Carolyn. I actually have a character in my current WIP that started out as a bit player and has pushed her way into the main cast. I love it when my characters help out. Give me more time to sit back and have a glass of wine. Now if ONLY the could walk the dog for me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've never had a character push their way into the spotlight, but I have had them go a direction I hadn't expected.

      Delete
  3. While the concept sounds mystical to anyone who doesn't write fiction, those of us who do write know it's a wholly natural part of the process. In my mystery Lies at Six (steeped in TV news and the South), protagonist Jolie Marston let me know at one point that she was horny and wanted an ego-boosting romp. It backfired. I harrumphed. "I told you so." But Jolie is a determined woman, and she would not be denied. Now, I am at work on the second in the series. On the days I don't get to the story, Jolie and her gay bon-vivant buddy Martin are standing on the sidelines, snapping their fingers, frowning. "C'mon," they growl. "We want more adventures, and we can't do a thing without you." They're very good at guilt.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Jeez, I get enough guilt from my family. I don't need my characters adding more!

      Delete
  4. I often try to turn the guilt back on my characters: "If you're so smart, why hasn't your book sold 100,000 copies?" That usually shuts them up for a few days.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Good one! A little guilt trip never hurt anyone.

      Delete
    2. Are your characters suggesting marketing techniques?

      Delete
    3. I wish they would. That's the part of writing I'm the worst at.

      Delete
  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Well, at least your characters know you're in charge. Whenever mine pull a shenanigan, I have to sneak in there and put things right while they are elsewhere occupied.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Usually, I like it when a character does something unexpected. I tend to let them go with it. Sometimes it stays. Sometimes it gets cut.

      Delete
    2. And sometimes it becomes the core of a whole new book.

      Delete
  7. Great blog on characters. Everything you said seems to be exactly what is happening to me--haunting my dreams, suggesting scenes with questions,
    Richard Brawer
    www.silklegacy.com

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. As long as they keep this up we don't have to worry too much about writer's block.

      Delete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...