It’s all in the planning, right?

Published by admin on November 19th, 2008

Getting everything about your characters in place before the writing begins is the surest means of weaving your story and characters together throughout your book - erm… no.

I was thinking around a recent comment on my character arc post. Kev wrote:

Planning a story arc for a character can be difficult until you know the character fully, this not always the case when you start a writing about/with them.

My response was that I did not feel the character(s) need to be completely mapped out prior to writing - in fact, I would now extend that to purposefully leaving gaps in the character’s personality and back-story that will be revealed by their actions as he lives and breathes the story.

The journey reveals the character

I have had my nose buried in a small book by Bernard Cornwell, the creator of the Sharpe series entitled Sharpe’s Story. If you are not aware, the Sharpe books are a model for how I will initially develop my TableRappers series, and so it was not difficult to find the time to read a book all about their history.

One early passage reminded me of Kev’s comment:

… I knew I needed a hero, but I never once sat down and tried to delineate him in my mind; instead I let him develop as I wrote the book … Sharpe was pretty much a mystery to me when I started writing [the first book].

Even at that stage, Cornwell aimed to write a series of books about his roguish rifleman in the Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800s, having himself been inspired by C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels. Yet, the central character of Sharpe was little more than a sketch, with simple back-story and a handful of influencing circumstances. Sharpe revealed himself as much to the author as he does to the reader.

I like that way of writing. Reading a book should be a journey of discovery, so why not writing it, also? Of course, there’s the ever present risk of having to re-work already written passages as a result of some late revelation, but writing is re-writing anyway.

The characters write the story

You may think it is the author who directs the passage of the story. But it is, in fact, the characters. Sometimes they surprise you with their actions. You may have one direction in mind but on writing, they can take off an run in a completely different direction. It is exciting (and sometimes troubling to get them out of whatever complications arise out of their actions)!

This may become an additional challenge for me from the second TableRappers book onwards. By book two, there will be few surprises buried in my characters’ personalities and lives. Though I do have a few clues to currently firmly secured skeletons here and there, I may find the adventure of discovering more of the people I am writing about to be more predictable - for me, that means less interesting.

I will only know for sure when I am deeply embroiled in book two. Hopefully, if the situations into which I throw my hapless characters are interesting enough in themselves, everything will work out just fine.

Book two, A Shot in Time,  will be a very intriguing exercise and I anticipate quite a contrasting writing experience that I am very much looking forward to.

Tags: characters, planning
Posted in Challenge |