One thing that I hear a lot from pantser is some variation of, “I’m a character writer. My characters come up with far more interesting things to do than I could ever plan.” Hearing this always makes me feel like a hack. I like to think that I’m a character writer, and other people have told me that my characters are good and interesting. Is that not true? Are my characters actually just paper-thin caricatures that I can force to do whatever I want?
Well, it’s not for me to say if my characters are any good or not, but I can say that they aren’t action figures under my complete control. I have plenty of strong-willed characters who won’t go along with my plans. Saoirse is a good example. There’s a scene early in my forthcoming book, The Harper, where Saoirse and Shane meet up, and I had planned for Saoirse to give Shane an explanation of the title character: who he was, what his goals were, and how he interacted with the rest of the Fae. Before I could write the scene, however, I heard Saoirse’s voice in my head, asking me how many drugs I had taken that I seriously thought she would do that, or conversely, how many drugs I planned to have her take in order to force her to do that. The Harper’s relationship to the Seelie Court is a complicated one, and the Court is unwilling to admit the truth about it to themselves, much less to outsiders. And I seriously believed that Saoirse, who goes above and beyond to make sure that she’s seen as a loyal, upstanding member of the Court, was just going to blab the full story to a mortal after one casual inquiry? Saoirse was right, I must have thought she was on drugs or had a serious head injury or something.
Saoirse has set me straight on a few other things too, ones that I won’t mention right now since they contain spoilers for Book 6 and beyond. She’s the most vocal of the Seelie Court characters, but she’s far from the only one. Emma has nudged me about things that she wouldn’t let alone. Shane has occasionally had to remind me that I’m writing the “old” him, the one before he really adjusted to the idea of the supernatural.
So how do I reconcile the idea of careful planning with characters who insist on doing their own thing? Basically, I need to include the characters in the planning process. Whenever the plan includes a character making a choice that radically affects the direction of the story, I need to “ask” that character if this is really the choice that he or she would make. The characters are rarely secretive about it. The opinionated characters are more than willing to tell me what they will and won’t do, and usually they’re just as willing to tell me in the planning stage as they are when I actually try to write the wrong decision; there’s no reason to wait to ask them.
Note, however, that “usually.” There have been times when I’ve been writing and then just hit a problem with my given plan, either because a character won’t cooperate or for some other reason, I realize that I was doing the wrong thing. Next time, I’ll talk about what happens when the plan goes off the rails in the middle of writing.