When your characters come to life

'They just write themselves!' said the writer

Humans are weird.

The creation of stories has always struck me as being especially odd. A story, with its characters and setting and plot, initially does not exist in the universe: and then it does. It’s almost alchemical. It’s a magic trick.

This is never more true than with characters. People that live on the page and can feel entirely real to the reader, and yet originated entirely within the author’s head. This is also where writers can get a bit eye-rolly and mystical. “They write themselves!” “The character refused to do it!”

Or perhaps not. Check out this interview with the excellent Sarah Perry:

“I think that the romantisisation of the creative process is actually a little bit dangerous. I believe that this is a craft, and we are craftspersons, and we can learn how to do what we do better. And the more we enjoy this very tempting tendency to think of the ‘muse having descended’, the less it feels like something you can get better at.”

Sarah Perry, 2020

I’ve always liked that point. There’s certainly something rather gatekeeper-ish about presenting writing as a semi-magical act of conjuration, a skill that you either have or you don’t. From that fallacy is the source anxiety and of many bouts of writers’ block.

Thinking of writing as a craft, as a defined process, turns it into something you can learn and get better at. You’re far less likely to become stuck, because there is always something to be doing. Even if it’s not putting words down on the page, you could be editing, or planning, or even just thinking idly about future ideas. Even writing an unsuccessful story is still progress, because you’ll learn from it.

Do you write every day?

I’ve certainly found that my writing has improved immeasurably since I began writing on a weekly basis. The same goes for writing this newsletter: committing to a weekly newsletter about writing sounded daunting, but the consistent doing of it makes it progressively easier. Sounds like a craft to me.

Back to the subject at hand. Sarah says something else in that interview when she gets to talking about characters specifically:

“When people say ‘I heard my characters speak’, it’s a way of describing the imagination.”

She pushes back against the notion of characters ‘coming to life’ and acting of their own volition. I remember struggling with this when I first saw the interview back in 2020, as I’d always held with the idea that the characters in my books ‘felt real’. Was I, in fact, deluding myself, and making something very process-driven into something fantastical?

At the end of writing A Day of Faces, I was palpably sad that I wouldn’t be hanging out with Kay and Marv anymore. I still occasionally miss Kirya and Tarn and Tranton from The Mechanical Crown, as if they were old friends I haven’t seen for years. I even think about the locations, as if I’d visited them on a holiday in the distant past.

I’m inherently a rational, secular person, so I’m not prone to flights of magical thinking. But I’m also very able to give myself over to a fiction, whether in my own work or someone else’s. So how do I reconcile these two things? At what point does the practical, hard graft of the craft segue into conjuring imaginary beings?

More to the point, if my characters didn’t feel ‘real’ to me, would they ever resonate with readers?

The trick to these things co-existing is probably to acknowledge that writing, or any form of storytelling, is a deeply strange thing. Humans are weird, remember? On the surface it appears to lack the practical purpose of other forms of human ingenuity: it doesn’t provide shelter, or transport, or work as a tool to enable a specific action.

Instead, it’s a way of transferring information, and of communicating. It’s how I extract my thoughts and deliver them to someone else. And characters within those stories provide opportunities to examine those thoughts from different perspectives. Each character is a different camera on a scene, or a different voice in a debate.

So what’s really happening when writers talk about their characters having ‘minds of their own’, or ‘refusing’ to do certain things?

Back when I started writing in my teens and early twenties, I was obsessed with plot. I used to think that was the most important aspect of a story, and would put undue attention on it. It made for very dull attempts at books. A sequence of events isn’t interesting in and of itself. Once I started writing more ‘seriously’ in my mid-thirties, I realised it was better to concentrate on theme and character, and my writing improved immeasurably.

Use themes like a compass

A consequence of de-prioritising plot is that I’m more open to changing direction during the writing of a story. Because the story is more driven by character motivation, that can end up feeling like the characters are taking charge, when actually it’s just a flexible writer adapting to the needs of the story. It’s all driven by me - the characters don’t function or exist without the author.

None of this is to undermine or diminish the satisfaction of writing good characters. To summon believable people out of your own head and present them in such a way that they start to feel real to other people as well is a remarkable thing in itself.

But humans are definitely weird for doing any of this in the first place.

What’s your stance on this? Do you think of your characters as individuals almost independent of yourself, or do you take a more practical approach? I suspect a lot of us will be somewhere in-between.