Whereas I am merely a conduit for my muse, who speaketh through me. My characters come to me, fully formed, and demand that I do their bidding. I am an artisté.
It would be an affront, not only to you, or to your words, but to the gods of literature themselves for anyone to suggest the slightest modifications to your work. I understand.
@Sack-a-Doo! and @BayView I'm never sure whether to envy writers who can approach your stories that way, or just to or think you're all total sociopaths in the way you treat you characters ...oh wait, I need to go make sure one of my characters finishes feeding a guy's head into a band saw (okay, I'm not actually writing that today - but it is something I have planned).
I think there's a pathology to be find in either course, so it's less of a yes or no and more of a pick your poison. Writers who worry and fret over their characters as though they were living, breathing people who file taxes give me pause.
I will never kill an animal in one of my books. Can't stand reading it so I won't write it. And I admit, I cry sometimes when I kill characters (if I write the scene right, I cry!) But I don't let it stop me from killing those who need to die. And I don't really get attached to my prose at all, I don't think. (My prose isn't really too note-worthy, though. Just a vehicle for the story. If I were a more poetic sort of writer, maybe I'd have more attachment/trouble.)
Is it just me or has WF seen a decline in the "HELP! My characters won't stop telling me what to do!" threads?
Thankfully, yes. I'm not a fan of the obligatory "my characters won't do what I want them to" threads. Those posts can be useful in digging into the real underlying issues in the work, but I don't like how they're often framed.
Just finished a new fantasy novel that I really enjoyed. Some animals die, but what bothered me is that my favorite character died, and in my view died in a way that didn't really work in the story. The character has street smarts, but just before death seems to abandon those. In the page or so leading up to the death, I'm thinking "No, don't do that, you idiot!" That kind of thing irks me (though I still give the book 4 stars on the whole). The author was clearly angling for an emotional punch. If the death had been more meaningful and in keeping with the character, I'd have been much more satisfied with that outcome.
Good question, but shouldnt we also ask. Why not kill our darlings? would it not be for many of the same reasons we would, or is there something that means that they cannot be killed. I have no qualms about killing the MC in my main series, at all. he's appeared in several asshole like versions throughout many different scrapped pieces, each of which has been killed because of them being the ever-so-joyful asshole that they were (and generally being nefarious, but that's beside the point) Obviously he's different now, but I will kill him if i see fit to. in fact... Spoiler: Plot spoiler for series He does get "killed" at the end of the 4th book, through trying to protect his friends and various plot points in previous books that hint towards something of the sort. when I say killed, he gets consumed by dark magic, effectively "killing" him, he appears, only in description, after the dark magic has consumed him, in a different book that has no relevance, but thought it would be cool to use that as a fun little thing for my own amusement. yeah, basically, all my books are going to have soem link to each other, but done as subtly as possible where needed.
Time for you to write the death scene for that character. After he dies, can you make sure his face is eaten by cats before the body is found?
Oh, yeah, it's got to be a good death. Messing up characterization just to hit a plot point? Why, it sounds like that plot point might have been that writer's darling, and should have been abandoned!
Yes. It's too bad, because on the whole I really enjoyed the book. But it's a newer author, so maybe it just comes from having less experience. This was her first major release (she has two other books that were well-reviewed in Australia, and are under some kind of indie imprint but look self-published). The death nature of the death irked me, but I'm also saddened that this is book 1 of a series and now my favorite character is dead
I have some passages that I don't think are bad, in fact I quite like them (i.e. darlings) but that really aren't working in a given story, or at least not at a certain place in a given story. Those are hardest for me to cut. I have a Word document that I paste that stuff into. Sometimes, the passages find homes in other stories where they do work.
Yes, thank goodness. I briefly joined a Facebook group for writers that was full of that. One woman posted that she woke up in the night and had a verbal conversation with one of her characters who told her how she [the character] wanted the story to end. The comments were full of people with similar anecdotes. I left the group.
Oh definitely - I think there's a lot of pathology to find in the writing world on all sides (actually there's lots of pathology in the human world in general) - but I do think it's funny to see all the different emotional reactions and non-reactions we all have to figments of our imagination. I find myself wondering about emotional attachment to people that don't exist, but I also find myself wondering about the people who don't have attachment and feed their characters to the grinder (...if you torture a non-existent entity for fun, but say it's not real, don't you still like the IDEA of torture?). The whole enterprise is strange - but I figure we're all strange to begin with, seeing as we basically all spend WAY too much time hanging out with (and being mean to) our imaginary friends.
Yeah I don't get this. I totally believe that this can happen - I get ideas in weird ways - but yeah, I'm not sure I could keep writing if that happened to me.
Oh and update on this - the book ended with us still not knowing whether or not the reality was a figment of the (dead) main character's imagination. Good book (award winning book) but I'm angry
I totally am with you guys on this. I don't really get what these writers are thinking. I find that I am in more control than I ever have been of anything else while I'm writing. It's my story I am making up. These characters aren't real people or three dimensional. They are just in your head. My characters don't become real and I certainly would never even start to think otherwise. I am creating stories not imaginary friends. And I don't think being grounded in reality hurts my writing in any way.
I thought immediately of that joke I posted about on page 1. I once had an entire chapter that didn't advance the plot and could have been removed without much effect but I liked it--it was sweet and funny and I enjoyed reading it back. I left it in when I sent it out for beta reading and nobody identified it as a problem, so that darling stayed in. Of course, it's only a darling according to SOME people's definitions. And I would have cut it out with only a little twinge of regret if it hadn't gone down well. I generally don't find it hard to cut things, even if I like them.
Just yesterday I killed a bit about how nobody who owns a meat cleaver ever actually uses it for anything, least of all cutting large hunks of meat. It sounded great when I wrote it, but really it was just a blatant and unnecessary author intrusion, so I gave it the axe. I think authors who are unable to recognize "darlings" in their own work are either inexperienced, arrogant, or naive. We all write them. It's inevitable. But being able to identify them during editing and having the discipline to delete them is one of the keys to writing well.
From the list of insults offered, I choose... Arrogant! I think people who make absolute statements about ambiguous topics are either ignorant, abrasive, or cranky. Or maybe lazy. Oooh, or they could be arrogant, too! Reductionist? Absurd? Pedantic...?
