Who's writing this story, anyway?

If it does, I assume it means some stories come from a subliminal place in the author's mind where they have been just lurking, waiting to come out.

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In my case, yes, that is what happens.

I have to mentally dig to remember these insignificant little things that are hidden in the creases of my brain. That probably explains why I am so tired when I am writing.


But there have been books written or said to be written by entities passed over - like "Messages from Michael," I think it was.

That's an old, but interesting book about a woman who channeled a spirit through her Ouji Board. She wrote about 3 books from his messages. Very interesting indeed.

Not something traditional Christians would appreciate, I don't think. For one thing, he said the whole Jesus thing never happened. Or at least not the way it is described in the Bible.

I wish my character could take over my story. I'm stuck.

But to your point, I think it just means that an author allowed the process of characterization to distract him/her from the development of the story. I would guess it happens all the time and is one of the reasons why writers (and editors) delete chunks of text. I don't think there's anything "subliminal" about it at all.

Fantasy

ColoradoGuy said:

One occasionally hears writers say something like, "My characters took over my story." The implication is that the author, at least on a conscious level, is not always in charge of what is going on. Is this just a coy conceit, or does it actually happen? If it does, I assume it means some stories come from a subliminal place in the author's mind where they have been just lurking, waiting to come out.

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Even in the case where a story's structure shifts as the composer gets into it, I don't think there is any reason to always suspect some direct, classic intervention of the unconscious. Lots of things can change as a work progresses and from the composer's point of view the sum of many small changes is indeterminant, especially if they are writing fast and well. After all, a lot of elements of composition are given by the genre and so on so a good composer is well aware of how to find structural solutions to plot problems and so on. So a lot of the subliminal stuff may be truly subliminal in the sense that it is more or less environmental and the composer is just doing their job by letting it flow into the story.

On the other hand, when a story suddenly doesn't flow, when some sense of unease comes to the composer, then there is reason to suspect the intervention of the unconscious and often only a series of small confrontations and revisions can allow the composer to get around the problematic stuff that might be lurking. Of course, if you're fairly experienced then you don't even quite register these little struggles and then you are surprised at the final result where you say (as I often do):
"Hey, I just Oedipalized the conflict and now Character X is a lot like somebody's mother." Sure enough. There may indeed be an unconscious after all. Maybe like this:

http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/psychoanalysis/freud3.html

I was thinking about "Seth Speaks," not Messages from Micheal, which is a series of books channeled by thousands of old souls that collectively call themselves "Michael."

Real Process

ColoradoGuy said:

Yeah, but I've heard authors claim that the characters actually took over the plot, driving it a way the author claims not to have seen coming. What I'm trying to do here is separate what is essentially a figure of speech, standard author-speak metaphor-trope, from an actual, real process.

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I think it's just a rhetorical ploy (the old "so lifelike" slightly transposed). Obviously characters don't in any sense take over. In the most extreme case some character may enable a composer to get into some otherwise repressed material, which, so to speak, would seem to "write itself" even though the writing would of course not literally be done by any one but the now-slightly-less-repressed composer of the tale.

I've heard large numbers of published fiction writers -- yeah, people you'd know, talk about character's "taking over" and "listening to the voices" in their heads.

It's not true, by any means, of all writers.

What's meant by listening to the voices is that for many writers they do actually "hear" in their mind/imagination their characters telling them stories; they reshape and reorganize and revise as they write.

In terms of a character "taking over a story," what's meant is that the writer has a certain shape, a narrative structure, if you will, and an idea about how the characters will interact and who's on stage at a given moment. . . but often, as writers write, they surprise themselves when a character they had not expected to be on stage, asserts him/herself and, more often than not, changes the tenor if not the direction and shape of the story.

I think there's a sense of becoming more familar with the characters as you write them. It's like making new friends (or enemies, of course), the more time you spend with them, the more you find out about them - what pushes their buttons, where they draw the line on different issues, what makes them act or withdraw. Sometimes it's a natural progression of seeking depth in the characters; sometimes it's a surprise - a twist that comes out of left field. I think the latter is when writers more often claim the character takes over.

ColoradoGuy said:

Yeah, but I've heard authors claim that the characters actually took over the plot, driving it a way the author claims not to have seen coming. What I'm trying to do here is separate what is essentially a figure of speech, standard author-speak metaphor-trope, from an actual, real process.

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I understand what you're saying. But what I'm saying is that it's just a reflection of presenting the "process" in different ways, i.e. it's a question of terminology.

For an author to claim that the plot went an unexpected way because of a character is not to say that he/she was no longer in control of the plot. It's just a way to note that the plot direction wasn't what was first planned/anticipated because of the process of characterization. It's a voyage of discovery, no? Even as I right this reply, I've said some things that were not distinctly in my mind when I started. To write down or express ideas opens the door, so to speak, for new ideas. That seems to be the core of the process, in my limited experience. To create some specialized non-conscious concept to reflect this seems kind of silly, to me anyway.

Blinded? No. Logically coherent? Yes.

Life-like artistic

ColoradoGuy said:

I agree with you, in fact. I've always wondered if asserting such a thing as this somehow makes the process seem more interesting, ethereal, or in some way "artistic." Still, Medievalist is correct in saying that an awful lot of successful authors claim something like it is happening.

ETA: I've always been largely an empiricist, so perhaps I'm blinded by that viewpoint.

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In rhetorical terms: to say that your "characters wrote" is to claim that you yourself are so adept at your artistry, so crafty at your craft, that you created characters with the life-like power of being able to compose their own story.
In more processural terms, to say your "characters wrote" is to say your original plan was vague or bad or at least ended up being altered a lot and since this is what interests you as a composer of tales, this is what you report.
A less likely explanation is the effect of the return of the repressed through various mechanisms.

Sokal said:

In rhetorical terms: to say that your "characters wrote" is to claim that you yourself are so adept at your artistry, so crafty at your craft, that you created characters with the life-like power of being able to compose their own story.

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In what way is that description in "rhetorical terms"?

I'm not sure what "rhetorical" means there . . .

ColoradoGuy said:

Yeah, but I've heard authors claim that the characters actually took over the plot, driving it a way the author claims not to have seen coming. What I'm trying to do here is separate what is essentially a figure of speech, standard author-speak metaphor-trope, from an actual, real process.

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This happens to me. I wouldn't call it automatic writing, but as my characters grow and develop, they start doing things that I don't always expect. In a recent scene that was supposed to be a little romantic, my character freaked. I read back and realized that it was perfectly natural considering something she had just gone through. Letting the characters come to life gives the story a more realistic feel - and adds some fun plot twists, too.

It isn't automatic writing (though that could be in interesting premise for a scary novel).
You write your characters and at some point, they do what it is in their nature to do, some things you hadn't planned in your notes or outline.
I love it when my characters do stuff on their own. I love figuring out the plot as I go along. I just need to know where I'm ending before I start, not how I'll get there.
Sometimes we do things in writing without consciously acknowledging what we're doing. On some level, we are making connections and processing, but it just flows out without planning and is a happy surprise.

Sokal said:

In rhetorical terms: to say that your "characters wrote" is to claim that you yourself are so adept at your artistry, so crafty at your craft, that you created characters with the life-like power of being able to compose their own story.
In more processural terms, to say your "characters wrote" is to say your original plan was vague or bad or at least ended up being altered a lot and since this is what interests you as a composer of tales, this is what you report.
A less likely explanation is the effect of the return of the repressed through various mechanisms.

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An athlete doesn't say to himself, "Okay, first I'll pivot, then step on the right foot, dribble twice and do a lay up." He's skilled, he's practiced, he's "in the zone" and it's like magic: slam dunk. Everything he knows synthesizes in those moments; it comes together and it works.
The writer is, in this way, much the same.

Topoi

Medievalist said:

In what way is that description in "rhetorical terms"?

I'm not sure what "rhetorical" means there . . .

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I think the idea of "characters writing" draws on the ancient topos of
the "art so lifelike that..." it does some other lifelike thing.

The reason for specifying "rhetorical" is a bit paradoxical in that the "so lifelike" topos is so dead (so to speak) that some reference to bringing it up as a ploy or topos gives some life back to the more or less buried and elided implications of characters so lively that they write their own stories.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_topos

or this:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521821599&ss=exc

Exactly

C.bronco said:

An athlete doesn't say to himself, "Okay, first I'll pivot, then step on the right foot, dribble twice and do a lay up." He's skilled, he's practiced, he's "in the zone" and it's like magic: slam dunk. Everything he knows synthesizes in those moments; it comes together and it works.
The writer is, in this way, much the same.

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A good or fluent writer is no doubt busy with plenty of other things and no doubt innocently falls to the first lingering bit of left-over ancient rhetorical topoi that he comes across. In this case the "so lifelike" image is barely there and so the writer who uses it is barely using it in a consciously deceptive way.

If you are going on and all is going well....from your point of view, given what you are noticing...the characters may be doing all the work....

And yet it is not literally true and there is a nice cluster of associations there, mostly buried ("things so lifelike")...and without thinking, any good writer uses them to explain himself in a conconventionally acceptable way.

Sokal said:

In rhetorical terms: to say that your "characters wrote" is to claim that you yourself are so adept at your artistry, so crafty at your craft, that you created characters with the life-like power of being able to compose their own story.

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I think some writers just are that good.

I like the basketball metaphor cBronco used - when you get so good at something that the decisions happen at a subconscious not a conscious level.

And it's difficult to deny that some characters can come alive in your mind when you're reading them - why shouldn't they when you're writing them?

Sokal said:

In more processural terms, to say your "characters wrote" is to say your original plan was vague or bad or at least ended up being altered a lot...

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Or you're just not so much of a control freak that you have everything planned to the n'th degree - which IMO leads to stagnant, flat and predictable characters.

Cath said:

Or you're just not so much of a control freak that you have everything planned to the n'th degree - which IMO leads to stagnant, flat and predictable characters.

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Hey now! Be nice to me...I'm trying. Really.

Sokal said:

A good or fluent writer is no doubt busy with plenty of other things and no doubt innocently falls to the first lingering bit of left-over ancient rhetorical topoi that he comes across. In this case the "so lifelike" image is barely there and so the writer who uses it is barely using it in a consciously deceptive way.

If you are going on and all is going well....from your point of view, given what you are noticing...the characters may be doing all the work....

And yet it is not literally true and there is a nice cluster of associations there, mostly buried ("things so lifelike")...and without thinking, any good writer uses them to explain himself in a conconventionally acceptable way.

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Maybe. To an athlete, it feels like flying. In writing, it is like magic. The brain is working on so many more levels that we can consciously acknowledge. The characters come to life. We create worlds, and people within those worlds. The people then do what it is that they do. We may not have planned it. It is not a contrived decision, but it remains true to our intention. We wanted those people there for a reason.
There's a point when you need to let go of the self-conscious notion of "what literary device shall I use?" or "how shall I be clever." It ain't all that stuff. At some point, you just tell the story, and all the stuff you've mastered along the way falls into place.

Did I say I was passionate about writing? I love it. I love to write the book I wanted to read. It's all good.

Sokal said:

A good or fluent writer is no doubt busy with plenty of other things and no doubt innocently falls to the first lingering bit of left-over ancient rhetorical topoi that he comes across. In this case the "so lifelike" image is barely there and so the writer who uses it is barely using it in a consciously deceptive way.

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You are confusing commonplaces, koinoi topoi, with cliches.

The topoi were virtues, not vices, and they still are; the topoi are important aids to invention.