(no subject)

[cimorene]

i dislike the affectation that characters speak to writers.

now, i personally haven't experienced this, but among the hordes of people who say figuratively that their characters "insist" on doing such-and-so a thing that they hadn't planned, are a few kooks who, when pressed, insist that, yes, the characters really do TALK to them. "he knows what he wants, and i say, 'say "x," dammit!' and he just says 'nooooo.'"

this whole idea irritates the hell out of me. i can't figure out if they're really deluded enough to believe the characters are somehow real, or if they just absolutely REFUSE to utter the word "metaphor" for feel of stifling their creativity.

Comments

huh.

[dorkorific.livejournal.com]

Dom says you're just in denial.

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

I do say that my characters talk to me, and it is a metaphor, but it's one that lets me make sense of some very muddled mental processes. "I tried to talk X out of doing this, but she insisted" is shorthand for "I wrote a scene that was full of stuff I hadn't been planning on putting there, and after I reread it I spent twenty minutes talking to myself and considering what seemed to be going on from X's standpoint, and argued myself out of doing it the way I had planned." c

[carraway54.livejournal.com]

I do use the phrase "characters talking" metaphorically, but as ellenfremedon said, it's shorthand for a more complicated process. I write for the most part in a series of intuitive leaps, & I don't always know where a piece is going when I begin it. When I say a character insisted on such-and-such, it's a metaphor for the total process of intuiting some new emotional stance & then mentally testing its boundaries. Will this work? Is this plausible? Could I write this, or this, instead? Verbalizing something like that is difficult, & if the author doesn't feel as though she's in control of her own writing, yes, it does feel like the characters are writing through her.

Hm. It seems to relate to the degree to which an author writes intuitively or from a plan, & the degree to which she feels connected to & in control of her own work.

[cara-chapel.livejournal.com]

I use the affectation too, and I'm sorry it bothers you. However, I think some of the comments you've gotten are right on the money-- it's shorthand, and relates to a sense of control and planning.

In my latest fic, a great deal is proceeding out of my unconscious, not my conscious, mind. Therefore I feel out of control, and yelp about Qui-Gon refusing to talk to me to tell me what he's planning to do. I like saying "he" is talking to me because there are parts of me that identify with him, and understand him (both on a conscious and unconscious level), and when they pull together to produce good stuff that I haven't consciously planned, it feels like an organic and discrete process, at least slightly separated from my own regular thinking. It's something I actually enjoy, at times, when it works well. It feels rather like free-fall.

I am aware that it's all me and my conscious and subconscious concepts of him that are producing what happens in fic; I never think that there's a real blue ghostie out there whispering in my ear...

That's me, anyway, but maybe some people like to remove themselves form what happens in their fic because they don't want to own their kinks? Or perhaps they want to be separate from the quality of what they produce? Blaming the story events on an outside force might absolve a bit of responsibility...

Or I can even think how pretending the actual character is speaking would lend a fic an air of authenticity, at least in the immature mind.