Novel Surprises

Don said:

Do you regularly get surprised by your WIP?

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All the time.

Does an author ever really have control of a novel, or is that an illusion?

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Yes. And no. And yes. And no. And....

I'd be surprised if I WEREN'T surprised by events in my stories. I purposefully don't do outlines for this very reason--I want to be excited and surprised too! I sit down to write with the thought, "What are my characters doing today?"--because usually, I honestly have no clue until I write it.

One of the biggest surprises I had once was discovering that a character of mine has DID (multiple personalities). All the signs pointed to it but I had definitely not seen that coming.

I know there are tons of other examples but I can't think of them and nobody would get them since they aren't readers of my work, so... Just suffice it to say that this is normal for me and always has been. I get the feeling my characters and stories are already happening and I'm just here to write it all down.

That happens a lot. Stories write themselves if you have enough life in your characters. What I don't like is when I want something to happen and they leave it out or bypass it.
Characters should be allowed their say, but don't let them take complete control unless their idea is beyond all doubt better than yours.
Is that schizophrenic?
I hope so or someone else is writing this!

All the time. And sometimes it depends on how my characters choose. They choose one path and the story is dull. They choose another path and suddenly surprising things happen like domino effects. That's why I always tell people to experiment with alternative paths/decisions.

Schizo, medium, whatever. There are those who believe that writers tap into a supernatural realm and tell the stories of the spirits there.
I believe all of space matter, anti-matter is all one big thought too big for any of us to catch as a whole so we gather bits and pieces of it.
Maybe schizo is what happens to people who have had a glimpse of the whole thought and it either drove them insane or they're so much a piece of that thought that we can't understand them so we write them off as crazy.

Gillhoughly said it all.

That's because they don't want you to know where they've moved to

Don said:

At the same time, I'm a quarter into this WIP, and I still don't know precisely where they moved to.

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But yes, my characters often surprise me, and not always in the nicest of ways. I did a novel and loved my female character so much that I did a sequel to it, but once the sequel was finishes, I realised I didn't like my female character very much anymore.

It's a good question. I've always considered the "material" coming from the subconsience mind, where a lot of imagination, dreams and so on come from. I've read a few books on modern "brain science, and feel that things like dreams look through your cerebelllum where you store information and then do a kind of mix and match designer thing, with what you have in there. That would account of steriotypes, similar plot types and all the rest because most of us have exactly the same things in our minds-- due to common education, and actual world history, philosophical movements and so on. Other things in the memory are personal experiences, even personal research, like going to a site, or attending an event, or meeting a person that makes it into your novel.

Now, who has controle? You still do because you don't need to write down everything that wanders into your head. If it dosen't work, it dosen't work. Some writers and editors use the term "killing your children," which is basically hacking out words that were particularly good, and that you loved but had to sacrifice for the good of the novel. It is difficult to make things look extemporanious, which is a goal of writing-- lends to freshness-- so you need to let a few random and unexpected things in. To have "all" random things will create a run-away train effect though. This was experimented with during the age of LSD and drugged-up writing (see: Naked Lunch and any of that ilk).

Control, on the other hand, does not need to be constant micro-managing detail. You needed "a reason for your character to make a move," and you came up with one. If you had stopped you might have come up with several.

I never think of what I am doing as totally original. I did not invent the language, grammar, plots, or any other of the tools I work with just as a music composer does not invent notes, chords, or the various forms of orchestration. I ingest the technical stuff after taking classes, or reading up on them, or seeing the work of other good writers, but those are the bare basics. Even what comes from my mind is 95% unoriginal. I did not invent men, women, cars, houses, love or genocide or any of the other things that might appear in my stories.

I think of what I do more as "composing." Even if my material comes from diverse places, composing is about controling the material and putting it into an identifyable form which says "more" than just a simple one line explaination of what life is about. It has always been my understanding that (good) writing should say something about the world. You should close a book and understand more about yourself. That might be candy-coated, but it is really delving into the connection between artist and audience.

I don't see how to get there unless you are in control, not only of your work, but of your thoughts and mind-- and I think this is a struggle that all "artists" go through-- sort of the fight between civilization and the wild, or control and chaos.

Oh well...

A character popped into my head some time back and I got all excited and started mulling him over and trying to develop him. Somewhere along the way he took a turn I didn't want him to take and now he's quickly headed in the exact opposite direction from what I wanted him to turn out in! Damn him!

I had this happen, too, with a kind of dysfunctional character I wanted to settle down. I kept pairing him up with different lovers to try to settle him and he kept running them off. I finally paired him with somebody he's stuck with, but I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that this lover is just as dysfunctional as he is, and the two of them are...well, not as settled or functional as I'd planned. At least they're still together...? *crosses fingers*

If I try to force certain characters onto a particular path, it just doesn't work. It's not the way they were "meant" to be, even if it's the way I wanted them to be. I may technically be in control, but it's not always a conscious decision. Sometimes the unconscious rebels.

I've always suspected that when I'm writing I'm having brain activity that is akin to dreaming. It feels that way, to have ideas I didn't know I was having simply pop into my head.

I liken the whole process to chemistry.

A writer has as much control over the situation as would a chemist.

Certainly you can be surprised when you mix chemical A with chemical B. The reaction is based on nature, and we don't always know what nature has in store.

But a gifted chemist usually knows, or has a strong theory, as to what will happen. A gifted chemist is, to a high degree, in control of the situation. He is delighted when something unexpected occurs, but he is not caught off guard by it. Even the surprises make sense to him.

A good chemist is the product of research and experimentation. So is a good writer.

One time, my character started really adorably, transparently flirting. That was great.

And another time, Love Interest A was looking for The Girl, and Love Interest B, just says, "I fucked her last night." And then I thought about it...and he had. He had been fucking her the whole novel, friends with benefits. And no one had told me.

And another time, The Queen of the Fairies showed up, and she was much more badass than I'd bargained for.

For me this is the fun part of writing, being a part of the story unfolding. If I put things aside for a long time, sometimes I'll marvel that I wrote a specific chapter, because it just seems better than me.

Dammit. Gilloughly said exactly what I wanted to say, in the very first response, including precisely the two lines I was going to quote.

I hate it when that happens.

caw

I'm reminded of an interview with Cheever, when the interviewer asked:

Do characters take on identities of their own? Do they ever become so unmanageable that you have to drop them from the work?

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To which Cheever replied:

The legend that characters run away from their authors -- taking up drugs, having sex operations, and becoming president -- implies that the writer is a fool with no knowledge or mastery of his craft. This is absurd. Of course, any estimable exercise of the imagination draws upon such a complex richness of memory that it truly enjoys the expansiveness -- the surprising turns, the response to light and darkness -- of any living being. But the idea of authors running around helplessly behind their cretinous inventions is contemptible.

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Cheers,
Rob

It definitely happens.

At the start of the chapter I'm currently working on, my two main characters had a totally unplanned disagreement. (A few chapters ago, they also had a major argument that elevated to verbal blows--that was planned.) They made-up soon afterward, but it nicely showed the continued strain that the situation has had on their friendship.

RobJ said:

I'm reminded of an interview with Cheever, when the interviewer asked:



To which Cheever replied:


Cheers,
Rob

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I'm not even sure what that means.

Charlie Horse said:

I'm not even sure what that means.

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I read it as "anyone who can't be in control of their characters strikes me as moronic in one sense. If you enjoy letting your imagination loose to go in new directions, that's cool and you can go ahead and do that, but to be unable to control something yourself suggests you yourself don't know exactly what's going on."

I've had novels surprise me in the process of writing them more than once. I can't say it's the characters taking over, more that I suddenly see how little details I hadn't paid attention to at the time dovetail to make something perfectly clear.

I hate when you have things planned out nice and neat and your characters just do whatever the hell they want.

Happens all the time. It's one of the reasons I love writing. No matter how in-control I think I am of the characters and the story, something will always land on the page that surprises the hell out of me.

"But the idea of authors running around helplessly behind their cretinous inventions is contemptible."

I don't think that any of us really think this way, it's just a flight of fancy on the writer's part. What it really means is, we've finally found the true identity and personality of our characters as we're writing them, that's all. But some people never find their true characters personalities and end up writing them with only one dimension.

I always have a general idea of how the main characters are in my novels, but yes, after writing them for a few weeks, they do change and mould into quite different entities than I thought they would be. For instance; I have a female sub-character in one of my novles, and althogh it's never said by any of the other characters, she is nice but she is nosey and loves to gossip, so therefore no one ever tells her anything that they want kept a secret. I didn't actually plan her that way, that's just how she happened to be.

I liken it to driving home from my day job, pulling into the garage, and noting that I can't remember any of the trip. Some call it being "in the zone." I suppose it's really your subconscious speaking, which is Dean Koontz scary when the character is a bad guy. In my novel Full Medical a reader complained so much that I killed off his favorite character early on, I wrote a short story "Character Assassination" to bring him back to life. And this guy wasn't even one of my zoned out characters!