Thursday Seeds: Talk to your Characters

The voices in your head that are your characters… 

Are you crazy?

In a sense, you are, but don’t take yourself to the hospital just yet. Get their names down. If they don’t want you to know them, they shut up real fast.

If they don’t care, you can have a conversation that may even tell you about the characters in your next book.  If you talk with authors, they will tell you that the best characters have minds of their own. They don’t fit in a sweet box and they usually, if given room, will change your story for the better.

You hear all the time as a writer, “show, don’t tell.” Show what? I have to tell the story, that’s what this is. But in reality, a lot of good story is revealed best through dialog of characters.

When you get them talking to each other, all you have to do is get down what they say.

“Why did she have my number?” Jen asks in a subdued voice.

“It’s the only other phone number for miles in this remote place, Jen. I had to give her something in case something really drastic happened. Though I’ll never marry her, I do care what happens to her, even if she is in a destructive phase. I had to get away.”

“Why have you been flirting then? You aren’t exactly single.”

“You want the honest truth?I can’t really help myself. I was drawn to you the moment you strode through that banquet hall toward Dr. Moore. I could barely finish that talk. What saved me is that I’d already done it a dozen times so my mind just stayed on autopilot. Didn’t you notice me stumbling on words?”

Jen smirks at him thinking back, “Actually I don’t.”

“Well it felt like I was. Suddenly the boredom was broken. It must have been the swirl of color of your pancho that caught my eye at first.”

“Nice try, Neil. What is her name?”

Well, in this exchange, the characters are awkward. Authentic awkward can move the story along. But you can get the idea of a direction that a story can take if you talk to your characters. 

You might wake up in the morning and completely scrap this scene and take a different stance depending on the story theme. This is only an example.

What I will say is that some characters, I’ve heard, can get so insistent that they start talking after you’ve written well past the halfway mark. You could be in Act 3 of your novel and realize how important this character is to the story. You may even have to go back through the rest of the story and add this character in because they have that much impact. That is the case for the character named Joshua in Madeline L’Engle’s young adult novel, Arm of the Starfish. There is an article about it where she talks about it here. 

Anyhow, Adam is swept into a web of International intrigue, and goes three nights without sleep. He is exhausted, and finally he is allowed to go to bed in the Ritz Hotel in Lisbon, and falls into a deep, long sleep. When he wakes up, there, sitting on a small chair and looking at him, is a young man called Joshua. Adam is very surprised to see Joshua. There was no Joshua in my plot. I could either say, “Go away, Joshua, you’re not in my plot,” or I could go back to page one and let him in–which is what I did. I can’t imagine the book without Joshua, but I have no idea how he got into the Ritz.

In someways what I’ve done is show you the inner workings of an over thinker. Which they all say is never good. But when you put it all out on paper, a lot of the energy and fear dissipates on the page. And so, I don’t care if those dialogs play out and they aren’t good, because I know that the good stuff will show up after I’ve named my fear.  

Do you know that song by REM, Conversation fear? Yes. This is another form.

If you recognize yourself or your name in any of these passages, it’s purely coincidental. I assure you all the names are from my head and are rarely ever directly from any one real person or group. 

It’s funny if you play ground hog day on the same scene. Every morning the day starts the same? Usually not. You would be amazed at how different the days can get even in the same parameters. I actually highly recommend doing the Ground Hog Day exercise on any basic scene of dialog. You will be amazed at all of the different ways you can write about a day that would seem boring and the same.