When Your Characters Speak to You
Posted on | August 15, 2010 | 2 Comments
This week, I’ve done very little writing. Well, that’s not exactly true, I’ve written sales pages, emails, comments, tweets, posts and the like, but not done a lot of creative writing. This is my first blog post on any of my many blogs in quite a while, and, besides notes, I’ve not move far forward with the novel. It happens sometimes. Is it writer’s block? No. Absolutely not. Besides the fact that I have said many times I don’t think there really is such a thing, my mind has been swirling with ideas the whole time. Sometimes it’s best to let them swirl (as long as you’re not using that as another excuse not to get stuff done) until they coalesce into a form that’s manageable.
So what are the ideas I’ve been riding along, Dorothy-like, in the storm of my mind? Well, let me tell you. I suspected the novel would be dark, but one of the characters just decided to have an affair with someone very inappropriate and two others are going to die quite unexpectedly, all in delightfully dark and twisted ways. I hadn’t expected a lot of death in this novel, and now there will be at least two bodies. You will grieve for at least one of them.
Writers often talk about the point where the characters start telling you what they are doing, what they want, start moving in directions seemingly completely outside your plans for them. It’s an exciting point to get to and I say 1) it is predictable and you can cause it to happen, and 2) they really aren’t outside of you moving your pen at all. Both of these things are caused by what I have been saying all along about the process of writing:
If you imagine the circumstances of the people, places and events, using all five of your senses, and dream yourself through the story, you will be feeding your subconscious mind with information and with a command to be creative. Your subconscious loves this particular command and will bubble what you’ve fed to it, churn it, cook it and feed it back to you in ways that will surprise you. It will really seem as if the characters are talking to you, telling you that what you planned won’t work, giving you suggestions or demands. Your subconscious has created these people to the point where it can’t tell they are fiction. Your subconscious doesn’t know what fiction is. To it, they really are real, perceived beings and circumstances and anything that don’t make sense, the things you planned that aren’t logical within the world you’ve created, won’t be tolerated by the reality you have allowed your inner mind to grow and experience.
So I’ve been being very productive. I just haven’t been writing. That will come again very soon. I can already hear Kyle’s mother telling me to stop judging her.
[Remember, for all the posts that deal with my new novel, click on the tag Old Magic.]
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August 17th, 2010 @ 5:53 am
OOOOOOOOH…my interest is piquing here, Geoff. Twill be interesting to see where you go from here. My problem is that I’ve lived such a quiet, midwestern, milk-toast life that I don’t have a lot of “life-experience” to draw from. Whaddya do in that case??? Hmmm???
August 17th, 2010 @ 10:13 am
What you do in that case is imagine. If you want to write about some place that’s real, do some research to get the feel for the place, then imagine yourself into that place, (or imagine your characters into that place) using all five senses. If you want to write about some place that isn’t real, make it up using all five senses, then imagine it, then imagine yourself (or your character) into it.