What Happens When Your Characters Don’t Want to Do What You Tell Them?
The question I get most often as a science fiction and fantasy author is: Where do you come up with your ideas? This article is the 7th in a daily series for Medium, analyzing the thought-by-thought process of coming up with the ideas for the daily fantasy blog about the girl who lives in her father’s dreams, The Squashbuckler Diaries.
Today’s Idea: The Characters Didn’t Want to Go Through with My Story
This happens. A lot.
I came to write a story in the daily fantasy blog in which one villain (General Hawk) threatened another villain (The Evil Fairy Forest King) because the Forest King messed with Joy, the 5-year-old heroine of the story.
I wanted General Hawk to find the Forest King’s weak point, and I wanted him to exploit the hell out of it, until the Forest King’s behavior reversed itself. That would have been today’s post. Eventually, in future posts, I had already decided the Evil Forest King would act up, and General Hawk would have to make good on his threat and kill the Evil Forest King. That would lead to a major rift between his adopted ‘Nestling’, Joy, and him, whom she considers her best friend.
So all I had to do today was to help General Hawk find the Forest King’s weakness.
In yesterday’s Medium article I showed how the technical part of finding a character’s weakness and exploiting it works — I had the Forest King do that to Joy.
But as I sat down to write, the characters didn’t want to do it. No matter what weakness I imagined General Hawk finding, the Evil Fairy Forest King would not be moved.
This happens, as I told you. A lot. To both good writers and bad. Bad writers stomp over what their characters are telling them and go on with their plan. That’s how you have characters do things that are uncharacteristic for them or things you, the reader, have been led to understand they could never do. The characters serve the planned story rather than the truth of the story.
When you write, your subconscious knows more about the story than you. It knows the characters better, it knows the mood better, it knows every single aspect of the story better than your conscious mind. So you listen to it.
I procrastinated for about 15 minutes before I decided that it wasn’t my procrastination holding me back, but my subconscious.
So I asked the characters: What would make sense to you?
The Evil Forest Fairy King was clear in that nothing could actually threaten him while he was a prisoner, certainly not another prisoner who is also locked up.
I ran through with the idea: What would it mean to the story if he wasn’t threatened?
This would happen: General Hawk would threaten. The Forest King would become stronger each time he refused to cower, and General Hawk would grow more impotent.
Inaction, in this case, would be more dramatic. And it would allow the Forest King to repeat his behavior with Joy in future posts until General Hawk would find a way to kill the Forest King once and for all. Which would lead to Joy hating her best friend in her father’s dream: General Hawk.
So you can see that the characters would not really dictate the overall plot. I still had control of that, just a better way to get where I was going. I liked this new path. It felt more right. It was more dramatic. It was more interesting. It was truer to the characters and it allowed them to reveal their true selves more.
So that is the story I told.
Join me tomorrow as I tackle how I came up with the idea in the story in which the Forest King messes even more with Joy’s mind, as per the road laid out today.
