It's Alive! -- Breathing Life Into Characters

It happens to me every time I write fiction, so by now it shouldn't surprise me, yet it still does.  Every time.  Not just surprise, but shock, amaze, and flabbergast.  I sit, working on what I think is entirely a conscious creation from my own head, and then, out of the blue, they take over.

Who are they, you ask?  Why, the characters, of course.

The first time it happened, my heart started beating like I was in one of those slasher films: you know, the sort where the chainsaw-wielding maniac is loose in the house and you just know he's going to be behind the next door you open.  I seriously started to worry for my sanity, and even now, though it's happened dozens of times since, I still get a little freaked out.

Here's how it happened that first time:  I was writing along, just as happy as could be, when all of a sudden, one of my characters made some factual statement about the fantasy world in which the story took place.  Here's the thing -- it was a fact about the world I didn't know about.  Here was the character, a creation of my own imagination, saying things I had no clue about.  It felt like one of those head-trauma patients who start spouting complex theoretical physics equations when they miserably failed high school math.

The thing was, this wasn't a unique occurrence.  Since that first time, I've had it happen again and again, and every time, it's startling and, in no small way, awe-inspiring.

In this novel I'm working on now for NaNoWriMo, it's taken a different form: characters appearing where I thought there would be none.  The characters themselves aren't just getting ideas of their own; the whole story is getting its own ideas about who should populate it and who shouldn't.

There are two possible explanations for this:  My subconscious is alive and well, providing my story with just what it needs even though I don't consciously realize it needs it; or else God (or whatever higher power you care to believe in) is guiding the story, and I'm just the tool He's using to write it.

Or, my personal opinion: God is guiding my subconscious to give me what I need to write the story He wants me to write.

However it's happening, the strangest thing occurs when my story gets a life of its own: it gets better.  When my characters are doing what they want to do (instead of being marched about by me), the story becomes more authentic somehow, feels more real.  It becomes less like I'm trying to grab these disparate elements and cram them together in a box labeled "novel," and more like I'm reporting on the events I'm seeing before me in an imaginary world.  The conflicts are more conflicting, the romances are more romantic, and the people are much more human.

What should you take away from this for your own novel?

• Watch for your characters to start behaving in unexpected ways -- That's your first clue they're trying to come to life.  Start taking more notice of what they do at that point.
• Remove the iron fist -- Step back and see what they do, then report on it.  Instead of bossing them about all the time (Go there!  Do this!  Say that!), let them have their own way, and then write the movie you see in your mind.
• Don't be afraid to poke them -- Like us, sometimes all our characters do is grab a bowl of ice cream, sit on the couch, and stare at the TV.  At that point, don't be afraid to poke them, usually in the form of causing some calamity to befall them.  That, at least, will get them up off the couch and doing something novel-worthy.

Treat your characters well, but don't keep them from pain and suffering, for that's the stuff of stories.  Remember -- a story without characters is just a background.

Next time, we'll talk a bit about setting and the role it plays in our stories.  In the meantime, if you'll excuse me, I have to go break my character's car's muffler....