When characters come to life

Many times I have heard writers talk about a character seeming to lift up off the page, feel real enough that they start telling their own story. Writers say, “The story writes itself. The character told me what they’d do.”

If I’m honest, most times when I hear these things I roll my eyes. I sense self-aggrandizement. I see reductive characters who replay tired tropes. They write themselves, perhaps, because the cultural script they replicate is plain to see. Or perhaps I’ve just been jealous. How I wish my stories leapt to life like that!

Sometimes writing will come in a burst for me, but far more often it is slow and labored, stop-and-start and painstaking. I meander for hours through my planning document, considering different paths my characters could take and what those paths would mean, what possibilities they then would open up. What would the meaning be? What paths should I close off to them? I fear committing to one path on the actual page, and so I rehash, plan again, consider. I lose energy.

I fear predictable, saccharine motivations. I want my characters to act out of great complexity, to consider their choices with reason. In real people, motivation isn’t a simple cause-leads-to-effect process. Rather, ten events in our pasts all have something to say about what we should do, and we consider them or act on impulse contrary to them all and make a choice.

I find myself belaboring my characters and tinkering. I write the backstories that will only be fleetingly referenced in the story. I go for walks thinking about this character and why they might be the way they are, and is a real person really ever like that? Is all I’m doing caricature?

I sense I’m overdoing it. I’ve been reading some short fiction in New Ohio Review recently before bed, and many of the characters feel real to me. I wonder what’s the best approach.

I’ve had a strange experience with a character in the last two weeks. A character in the novel I’m working on, one whose primary function so far has been to create challenges for the protagonist, to give him something to butt up against, I came to a scene where she was going to have a larger role. And I realized I had not explored her deeply enough yet. I had ideas–I knew she would go through transformation from practical and exacting to someone freer and sadder. But why was she so harsh at the beginning? I didn’t know, and I sat down for two days of writing time to brainstorm this.

Something happened, and I began to understand her. I was able to find some thematic resonances with other things going on in the story. I went for a walk, and pieces seemed to fall into place more as she lifted herself out of my brain. I had the feeling that I was telling not my own created story, but the story of a real person I’d encountered. For a short time I had the feeling that has made my eyes roll when expressed by others. I had to eat my words.

Plotting or pantsing, and what it means for characters

At the large and medium scales of my writing, I am a devoted plotter. I plan the trajectories characters will follow, what settings they will inhabit, where the course of meaning will go through the story. But once I’ve formed the broad idea of action in a scene, the actual construction of it is often pantsed, unplanned, seeing where the words naturally lead me. When I come to an impasse, I return to my planning document and riff there freely until I find a solution that feels in keeping with the whole movement of the work.

The planning for me sets core character traits, but often enough the actual writing develops them differently. Pantsing a character I suppose is probably letting my subconscious run and fill in gaps. Often I find myself later rewriting these scenes, but sometimes the pantsed version shows itself to be stronger than what I had planned. I keep it.

How real is a character?

What is happening when a character seems to come to life? Maybe there is a muse there, somewhere in the ether, whispering a human story that I’ve tuned into. Maybe it’s me having created something complex and internally consistent enough that inputs can be processed seamlessly into character actions. Maybe it means I’ve found a corollary for this character in my own psychology. I channel things through this part of me, and the ideas come easily because the channels already existed. Maybe it’s a sign that we are really inhabiting our stories, that we have lived enough in them that they are in fact real inside of us, and now we slowly ease them out onto a page.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this newly alive character of mine develops. Where will she go and what will she do? Maybe she and I can work together to decide.

What do you think of this idea of a character being real, coming to life, clamoring to tell their own story? How often does this happen for you, and what brings your characters to that point of seeming independence?

Thanks for stopping by, and happy writing to you,
Jimmy