My main character wasn't initially my main character. But she ended up being the one who the story really mattered being about, despite the fact that I thought each and every one of my other characters was more flashy, more extroverted, more fraught with despair and potential ennui and devastation. But no, after much needed advice about a year ago, I had to sit and think about my book and what it meant and why I had four characters doing the work of two. And then I even realized that the two sisters were not even pivotal around each other and so one sister got the shaft and voila, we ended up with the quieter of the two.
Quiet is interesting. She allows things to happen to her and reacts by not reacting. She's a doormat trying not to be a doormat anymore. In terms of a character growing (because we must have growth in a character to have movement in a story, right?) this is fantastic. I've sat on this story for two years, allowing it to percolate in my head, writing down odd drafts of scenes, tossing them out completely until I finally got it right in my head and then began the hard process of figuring out what my style of writing as a fiction writer was. (Another post, to be sure. I'm always interested to learn how other writers write: process is an endlessly fascinating subject to me.)
So now that I have my initial process figured out and I am still in what I consider to be my discovery phase (writing scene after scene in no particular linear fashion but just as they causally seem to occur to me and I have not gone back yet to read what I've written since discovery seems more important than tying in relationships at this point), I have discovered, to my great chagrin, that my main character, whom I have grown rather fond of, is TAKING OVER MY BOOK.
She is doing things I don't approve of. I didn't set up her personality this way. I created her thirty-five years of history to garner a very specific sort of reaction to a carefully controlled set of events that I started. And she's mucking that all up.
So, do I allow her to continue and see where she goes? Or do I reign the wretch in while acknowledging the irony of the situation and forcefully take back my creation?
In poetry, we write as an act of discovery. I am not sure there is a similar motto in fiction. If there is, no one told it to me. I thought I had already discovered what I needed to know about the book's general theme before writing it because I think it is important to have some idea of why you are writing it; a guideline of purpose: a book can be about loss or redemption or the artificiality of soul in a modern age of consumerism....whatever your cup of tea may be. So it isn't that my character is straying from my book's overarching thematic purpose - in fact, she's embracing it. It's just that, she's straying from the outline I had in my head. My epilogue was one of the third or fourth things I had written so it is definitely disconcerting to see that now I may have to write a couple epilogues and see which one the shoe drops on. She's definitely going a darker route than I was. Flannery and Virginia would be pleased, I'm sure.
I guess I'll let her have her way, since no one else ever has, including me. Maybe she'll self destruct. Maybe she'll get herself out of her mess. Maybe she'll be brilliant because of it. Maybe she'll fuck the book up. Who knows. I've heard of characters taking over before, but to be honest, I must have totally slept through that day in class because I don't recall if this is a good or bad thing. Let it be good.
No comments:
Post a Comment