May
23rd
2023
Pat Murphy on getting characters to do what you want them to · 3:32am May 23rd, 2023
I can't just push a character around and make her do this or that--if I did that, I'd end up with a character I couldn't believe in. But by thinking about what a particular character wants or needs, I can give her a reason to behave in the way that I would like her to, one that moves the story in the direction that I want it to move.
-- Pat Murphy, "Imaginary Friends" (comments on writing "Rachel in Love"). In Robin Wilson, Paragons: Twelve Science Fiction Writers Ply Their Craft, p. 135. NYC: St.Martin's Press (1996).
Paragons is a great collection of stories, with some great commentaries by their great authors. I'll probably quote more from it. You can buy it used on Amazon for $7.50, including shipping.
It is a sign of becoming a good writer if you start having characters balk at what you want to do with them, thus making the story go down different roads.
One of the great things about writing is finding out what happens to a character as opposed to what you wanted to happen. I discovered that fairly early in MLP and I have to blame Pumpernickel. (Yeah, he gets a lot of blame) He was created because I needed a Night Guard to be stuck in an embarrassing situation of having his tail caught in Luna's slammed door. It was a bit part, probably paid union scale, and I didn't think he'd ever show again. As the plot moved on (sorry), he kept getting dragged back into the dance, sometimes leading, sometimes following, and other times stumbling into the scenery and causing a collapse.
Green Grass had much the same arc (with less tail-in-door drama) When I started writing Tutor, I had two points nailed down: The Dramatic Introduction (with subsequent lob into the Ponyville fountain) and the Train Station Goodbye trope. The rest was a blank page covering one month (my self-imposed deadline) I wound Twilight and GG up, let them go, and followed around with a typewriter until it was done.
In both cases (as above) I had characters reach certain points where they needed to make a right or left turn for plot advancement, and I had to ask the writer question of "Why are they doing this?" (i.e. the movie version of asking the director "What's my motivation for this scene?") Sometimes this involves going back a chapter or two and 'salting' a previous situation so the reader isn't baffled about the sudden left in this chapter, i.e. Green Grass being properly paranoid about his parents trying to set up an arranged wedding or Pumpernickel's horrid case of imposter syndrome from bearing a name that he doesn't feel worthy about.
Really, one of the worst things you can do as a writer is to have a character take a dramatic action without at least some reasoning behind it, even if it is "The character is crazy." You should at least give fair warning so some of the readers understand. (You'll never hit 100% on this, and God knows I've tried.) As an example, I give this chapter end scene in Tutor:
To which I got at least one response from Seether00:
(And arrgh, you made the World's Cheapest Person buy a book. Just ordered from Amazon.)
Huh, this relates to both a comment I received recently on a fic, as well as something that came up in a recent blog post of mine: basically, the subject of characters doing things you didn't expect, or inscrutable motives for a character.
I remember the first time it happened to me, I was just typing away and all of a sudden one of my characters did something I didn't expect, and I pushed myself away from my keyboard and started wondering why she'd done what she did . . .
The funny thing is with the way I write, I rarely need to worry about forcing a character to behave in a way I want her to: I'm the very epitome of a pantser/discovery writer; most of the time I have a sort of broad concept for a story and then I work on the rough outlines of the characters and let whatever happens happen.
Many many years ago I was working on a (still unpublished) story for Fimfiction where I'd picked my ponies and had a broad outline of what was going to happen, but hadn't figured out all of their characters yet, so I figured that the best way to do things was to just put a couple of them together and see how it went . . . turns out it went surprisingly well, and even though that story needs major work to ever see the light of day, the section with two ponies just doing stuff that's not in any way important to the plot is a really good section for both worldbuilding and character-building. Not to mention it's the least forced character introduction in the whole story as it currently sits.
I don't know what to make of that.
In the words of Brian Brushwood, when someone hands you a gold bar, you say "Thank you, I've been expecting this."
5730128 Just a few days ago, I noticed that Diana Gabaldon's famous historical romance novel Outlander came free with my Audible subscription. I listen to a romance novel now and then, because romance is a weak point in my writing. Until then, I'd found that no romances written after Gone with the Wind (1936) were bearable. (Some novels that have romances, but aren't labelled as romance, are good.) The badness of contemporary romance is shocking.
But I started the first Outlander novel, and it was great! She put an incredible amount of research into getting both 1940s and 1740s Scotland right, and the characters were so interesting, just bantering and getting on with daily life, that I thought it was going to be a great novel.
Until the romance started. Whenever she starts talking about sex or romance, it gets cliched, unbelievable, or boring. It's like the characters do great "without her", but whenever she pushes them towards each other, it gets clunky. (Mind, I haven't heard much of it yet.)