I’m perfectly willing to dash my characters’ dreams. Sometimes I enjoy doing it; sometimes I feel remorseful. But I have no reason to coddle them. The characters are not my children. The stories are my children, and I want them to be the best they can be. I want them to be what they need to be. As a responsible fiction writer, I serve the story.
Whatever your main character wants, you have to keep her from getting it too easily. Knowing what characters really want is often a challenge for me. As a reader, I don’t like complication for complication’s sake. Reading about a character constantly striving for the next accomplishment is not inherently interesting. Some ideas are ridiculous. You don’t simply have your character get into a car chase or have a satellite fall on her house because you can’t think of anything else. The complications have to be purposeful to the story and plausible within the world that character lives in.
Tension can be fascinating without getting convoluted. In earlier drafts of the story I’m currently working on, I kept the protagonist from what he wanted, but I wasn’t even really sure why. He pined for the past, and he got whiny. Worst of all, I gutlessly ended the story in a moment that could be interpreted as him either getting what he wanted or not. None of it was particularly interesting. Various readers said it was potentially interesting, but there was no tension. Neither a car chase nor a screaming hot satellite reentering Earth’s atmosphere would have livened things up.
After years away from the story* I came back to it about a month ago. Various readers had told me they found previous drafts potentially interesting, so after letting their insight simmer, I decided to let the story tell me where it needed to go. I don’t know if a story can actually write itself, but it seems to work. The story becomes its own energy source. I felt rejuvenated and had some ideas; it was time.
Over a few weeks’ time, I developed a revised version in which the protagonist reveals much more about himself to the reader than in the earlier drafts. He’s a bit bolder. Since he’s quite a loner, I had been thinking of him choosing his words carefully, but now I realize he considers his narration a private conversation. Although he’s not naive enough to assume a reader will keep his secret, he knows he doesn’t have much to lose.
In this round of revision, I’ve become bolder, too. I’d planned on that, but I had to start writing to feel the momentum. Rather than holding things back from him, I realized (because the story told me) that he needed to get what he wants, more or less. He has to believe that he won’t get it until near the end, he does. And then he has to deal with it.
For a long time, I thought the character’s shy act was just him playing hard-to-get. Nope. That was me. I understand why. The situation is unusual and hard to explain. Finding the words has been difficult. The changes may not work, but at least I’m not bored with the story anymore.
That stuff I fed you earlier about letting the story decide what it wants to be so it can power itself–it’s all true, but it’s really just the result of me psyching myself up to believe I can do the work. Every time I write, I feel a little reluctant. There’s a constant, nagging anxiety about what I’ll find, especially that I’ll find nothing significant. A lot of writers feel this kind of doubt. I have to push myself through the resistance every day– one word, a sentence, a paragraph, a page, whatever it takes to start writing and keep going for a while. Which I’m doing right now, and for the moment, I don’t care if anyone else likes this. I’m excited. I feel daring.
* I have purposely not given the title or character names because the story is at a vulnerable point in development. Writing too specifically about the story might undermine the story itself. At least that’s how it feels to me.
James Black is a founding member of Book Writing World. He earned a masters degree in English literature with an emphasis on creative writing at the University of Missouri at Columbia. His work has been published in the anthology The New Queer Aesthetic on Television and in the journal Anon. He’s writing his first novel about the family of a closeted, gay soldier stationed in Iraq. Check out his blog, Quota. He contributes to the BWW weekly!