When your characters come alive...

Pentagon said:
So, slightly darker question- how do you lot feel if you have to kill off a living breathing character... One presumes they don't go quietly!
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A great character deserves the best possible story or I'm failing them. I've found if they're not going quietly they weren't meant to die - those that are intent of dying won't let me keep them slive.
 
Pentagon said:
So, slightly darker question- how do you lot feel if you have to kill off a living breathing character... One presumes they don't go quietly!
Click to expand...
This is something to approach with care. I know the pain of having killed off a character only to realise there were still things she needed to do in the story. Making a character suddenly survive until the end when they previously died halfway through is a pain.
 
As you can see I'm new to this forum, but that doesn't mean that this subject of characters is old to me.

In my case, fantasy to me means having my characters survive to the end of my novel. Most writers (good and bad) kill off one or more of their characters. I said, "For once I like to see all the characters survive." So I decided I'd write a story this way. I know that this isn't logical or like real life, but hey, this is fantasy and I'm calling the shots. Now if the reader buys this premise is another story.

Am I totally against killing off characters? No. Guy Gavriel Kay is very good at this for it evokes an emotional response from the reader. To me this make the story more interesting.

My goal is to keep my characters alive, however I've become aware that the situations that I put my people in may dictate otherwise.
 
The death of the main character in my novel actually sets up future stories. I knew from the beginning she would die; it was a part of the storyline.

Now, would someone care to explain that to my mother for me? :unsure:
 
Some of my characters get off screen deaths at the end, epilogue deaths...

But mine is a political story, where various characters get the death penalty, so in their line of work that can be considered a natural death...

Whether, they are stronger than me by the end and that actually happens remains to be seen!
 
I haven't had a character resist dying, I did have one tell me I was a sick so-and-so for coming up with a plot that made her a no good tramp. I hadn't seen the plot in just that light. But once she pointed it out I realized how stupid it was to have a strong female lead who can lead her country and talk two different male leads into helping her defend it against a third (whose army may or may not have been demonic, he never would say.) be a sisy-feather-head about needing to marry one of them, and not the one she promised to.
Then they two male leds joined in saying that while their reactions weren't wrong, they agreed that the whole situation was bunk.

Basically my three main characters ganged up on me and told me not to write their story at all. Which might explain why their antagonist just laughed at me the whole time I was trying to write the damn thing.
 
My characters feel very much like real people. I sometimes go a little too far in trying to understand them. I was working on a spy story and adopted the same exercise routine and training, for instance. I was working on a character who was kind of dick once and was struggling with him until some young guy tried to harass me in the street and he just jumped straight out and scared him off for me. The characters in my latest book were very real. I did illustrations using only silhouettes but even then, giving them that shape felt very strange, they were ideas in my head and now they had arms and legs and mops of ginger hair. I'm probably just rambling now. Sorry.
 
This is a good thing. I'll never forget when one of my characters introduced me to his wife. I didn't know she existed, and suddenly she was in the scene I was writing, and became critical to the story thereafter!
 
I wrote my first book in 1993. Obviously it's terrible and I'm re-working it now into something passable. I discussed it widely with friends and they actually started to take on the characters, even adopting their names. Looking back, it was all a bit creepy, especially when they started dating my ex-girlfriends.
 
One mark of an interesting character is when they deviate from your plan. Because that means you've created a dynamic personality not constrained by your original vision.
 
I agree, I don't like to keep my characters in a box. Well, except one because the book was called 'The Box' and she lived in it so there was really no way out of that. I find that original visions are a great place to start but they're not where you should expect to finish. My latest book is now a comedy, I didn't intend it to be, the characters just took over and mental illness/alcoholism did the rest.
 
This feels a bit spooky - I've been away from chrons a while, swamped with tedious, self-employed non-writer stuff, now having a week off because I'm too ill to work, and posted a thread about writing a blog as one of my characters. Now he's got his own blog I probably won't get any peace and it wouldn't be so bad if he agreed with me, but whilst a lot of his views must naturally come from me... he is a contrary *******.

As for killing them off - the series my errant character is supposed to live in (I'll get him back in the box eventually) covers a sort of time-travelling space-opera, so I do get to put things out of strict chronology. Almost by accident, I have ended up finishing each one with an epilogue which is the obituary for one of the major characters, which I find incredibly hard to write, and nearly as hard to re-read.
 
When I was first writing my WIP, my characters felt very much alive. I knew everything about them, and could easily write them chatting away about anything.

But when Teresa did my first edit, she said my use of character was a serious weak point (among other things!!).

It's one thing for characters to react to stuff, but without any deeper motivation, they were very passive.

What I'd thought of as character was really just superficial - a bit like the difference between very friendly with workmates, sharing a laugh, etc.

But for protagonists, you need to know who they really are inside - their deepest, darkest secrets and desires - with the intimacy of a lover.

And I found that a seriously tough challenge. Especially as, writing epic fantasy, I had seven of them to deal with!
 
I have various ideas as to how my character would react to a given situation, and one stands out more strongly than the others. Does my character some alive, direct me, force my hand in anyway? Of course not, and I genuinely have considered it one of those weird writer's pretences when people suggest that they do.
 
Chinspinner said:
I have various ideas as to how my character would react to a given situation, and one stands out more strongly than the others. Does my character some alive, direct me, force my hand in anyway? Of course not, and I genuinely have considered it one of those weird writer's pretences when people suggest that they do.
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I understand what you're saying, but I think it has more to do with how different writers perceive their world and approach the writing process. Some (myself among them) can get so wrapped up in the story unfolding before them that they lose the sense that they are writing the story and begin to feel that they are witnessing it instead. Then it becomes transcription, versus creation.

But writers are known to be weird, so take that however you will :LOL:
 
All characters live in your head, whether they are main or supporting.

What they do to get out of there is often weirdly surprising.

I've had one in my Dark Lord tale that has gone from a one off joke to become a key role.
 
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