as small as a world and as large as alone, In one of the other asks, I notice you said you...

8:08am January 30, 2014

stiltfox asked: In one of the other asks, I notice you said you "found" Carmela. I also noticed that you tend to ask your characters about situations, and have conversations with them. Is it more that your characters find you, with personalities and names and opinions, than you finding them in your mind? (I only ask because it feels very similar to how all of my characters show up to me. Fully formed with their own names, families, opinions, and often without my input.)

dduane:

When I said “found” I should have been a bit clearer. What the process looks like for me is something like this:

Sit down and think “Okay, I need to write about this conversation between Kit and Carmela.”

Get more or less instantaneous image of her lying on her stomach on her bed watching Pokemon in Japanese.

Start working out what the hell I can best make this mean.

Every writer has a part of their process that’s a “black box”. You can’t get into the box and don’t know why it works the way it does (and in a lot of our cases we’re frankly scared to mess with it for fear we’ll break something. Or get into a situation like when you take a watch apart and put it back together and then find there’s one part still sitting on your desk and you have no idea where it should fit). This is why when writers tell you how they work, you need to assess carefully whether they actually know what they’re talking about, or whether they’re attempting to describe a “black box” phenomenon that they only partially understand (or not at all). Which is not at all unusual.

Anyway. That flash of image comes out of my version of the “black box.” I have no idea why story material in potentia so often chooses to manifest itself to me that way. I assume it’s a way my unconscious/subconscious has determined is the quickest and most effective for communication with the (theoretically) conscious “working” writer-brain. Over time, I’ve just learned to deal with it. Part of this involves feeding my brain with as much visual imagery as I can cram into it, so there’s always plenty of raw material to work with (and you can see some of the fallout from this in my Tumblr: much reblogging of objects of beautiful design, fine art, landscapes, the human body in its many varieties, studies of faces and hands). Also: much film and TV gets crammed in there, as much for the imagery as for business purposes.

In any case, after the image occurs, I sit still and start deducing it (and here my work methods are definitely influenced by those of the consulting Detective without peer). Why is she doing what she’s doing, why is her hair like that, why is she wearing the clothes she’s wearing? Etc, etc. As more conversations get written between her and whoever else she talks to, a picture starts to build up. Dots get connected and I start building and inserting backstory. Bits are tried out, evaluated, thrown away if they don’t work or seem to invalidate other parts of the character in progress. Once a sort of “base state” is set for the character, then interaction with other characters in the work starts defining her own traits further: she starts to round out. But at all times this is a conscious business for me: as if a character was a bookshelf I was building and then stocking with a certain set of books. The content may change over time, but that’s because I walked up to the bookshelf and looked it over and thought All right, this has been too static for too long, this setup is going to inevitably be modified by what’s going on in the next bookshelf, let’s mix things up a little…

So who finds who (in terms of the author-character relationship) is a tossup. What’s certain for me, though, is that the character is a built construct, designed for a specific purpose. I don’t allow my characters to dictate to me, especially if their putative actions show signs of interfering with a tightly constructed plot. If something like that starts threatening to happen, the character in question is likely to wind up being killed off for getting out of hand. (Insofar as this is anything more serious, in some of my universes, than being sent to the Sin Bin in a hockey game.) I run a tight ship.

Conversations with the characters are always permissible, if it helps the work in hand, but these always happen on my terms: I invoke them and I dismiss them. (In fact we get into this a bit in the next YW 30-day OTP episode.) I feel strongly about taking responsibility for what happens in my creative world, and about never abrogating that responsibility to the presence or absence of some Muse or other. Don’t mistake me here! I like the original Nine, I really do. But if I met (in the road, as one is supposed to meet the Buddha) someone purporting to be my Muse, I would, according to the aphorism, kill him. Immediately. And then get back to work.

…Anyway. Other people handle their characters in their own way, and that’s absolutely fine with me. Each writer must do whatever he or she [or whatever gender pronoun is preferred ] needs to do to get the writing process handled for best results, and that’s absolutely fine. But this is how I handle mine.

HTH. :)