{"id":9102,"date":"2012-05-28T05:41:47","date_gmt":"2012-05-28T13:41:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aidanmoher.com\/blog\/?p=9102"},"modified":"2012-09-09T13:53:10","modified_gmt":"2012-09-09T21:53:10","slug":"characters-something-never-comes-from-nothing-by-robert-jackson-bennett","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanmoher.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/articles\/characters-something-never-comes-from-nothing-by-robert-jackson-bennett\/","title":{"rendered":"“Characters – Something Never Comes from Nothing” by Robert Jackson Bennett"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>There was a moment the other day when I saw a famous author on twitter point out to everyone that they were not their characters. \u201cIf I was,\u201d they said, \u201cwe\u2019d all be in danger.\u201d This was a joke, of course \u2013 the suggestion was that since a fair share of their characters were murderers or psychotics, then the author could not be them, as the author is not, to the best of anyone\u2019s knowledge, a murderer or a psychotic.<\/p>\n

This joke highlights one of the fun, fuzzy, gray areas in writing relationships \u2013 where do characters come from? How do writers make them up? Or do they make them up at all? <\/p>\n

Characters aren\u2019t precisely \u201cmade up,\u201d I don\u2019t think. When we think of fictional characters, we imagine them as just sort of popping into space \u2013 they do not exist, and then the writer thinks of them, and suddenly they\u2019re there. Something from nothing, in essence.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not from nothing. People think writers work with no raw material at all, but they actually do \u2013 they work with themselves.<\/p>\n

Imagine a writer as a huge, swirling, dripping ball of knowledge, memory, and experience. The ball is so big it\u2019s impossible to hold in your hands, or even to get your arms around \u2013 after all, we\u2019re talking about years and years of conscious and subconscious impressions, connotations, associations, all kinds of messy intangibles. And you can\u2019t funnel that into any one character \u2013 the ball is just too big and unwieldy for anyone to make a copy of it.<\/p>\n

So what does a writer do? They pull off a chunk, like a piece of clay. Then they take that chunk and massage it, and maybe add more chunks from the main ball if they think it\u2019s necessary, and they sculpt it and shape it and adjust it until it has the semblance of a real person \u2013 the sculpted chunk\u2019s got emotions, experience, agency, prejudices, goals, all that kind of fun crap.
\n
\nAnd they\u2019re all, more or less, derived from that main ball of knowledge, memory, and experience.
\nBut note that the character is not a real person \u2013 it\u2019s just a semblance of a real person, a picture. A writer can\u2019t make a real person, in other words \u2013 they can only convey the idea of one. If they do this artfully enough \u2013 if they pull enough raw material (and the right kind) from the main source to form a well-rounded, reasonable, informed idea of a person \u2013 then what the reader receives on their end is a well-written character.<\/p>\n

And my personal definition of a well-written character, just so\u2019s you have it, is a character who is thoroughly, meaningfully connected to the world the story takes place in, who is also invested in the story to a believable degree, and acts in an informed, reasonable manner to affect the events of the story to try and meet their goals.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a pretty antiseptic way of putting it. There\u2019s a lot of richness I\u2019m leaving out, in atmosphere, detail, dialogue, internal monologue, all the fun stuff. But you can see that the character\u2019s emotional connection to the world and its story can only be informed by drawing from the emotional experience of the author.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean that I, having written about starvation, hobos, union busters, and vaudevillians, have any such experience in these matters. I don\u2019t know what it\u2019s like to kill, to break a limb, to jump a train, to brush shoulders with gods, and I don\u2019t really want to know.<\/p>\n

But I do know what it\u2019s like to be lonely. I know what it\u2019s like to feel suddenly afraid, like the world is completely barren. I know what it\u2019s like to feel lost in the cacophony of everyday life. I know what it\u2019s like to make crushing choices. I know the voices of cynicism and idealism that argue constantly in my head quite well. These things I know \u2013 and they translate to fiction very easily.<\/p>\n

I am, in a way, writing what I know.<\/p>\n

So no, a writer isn\u2019t their characters. But their characters \u2013 especially their memorable, successful, well-written ones \u2013 are a part of them. Writers pull a lump off the side of the big, swirling ball inside of them, and maybe that lump just happens to have a streak of flightiness in it, a few pits of bitterness, and maybe a swirl of rage. These are things that are definitely in the author \u2013 perhaps constantly, perhaps surfacing only briefly \u2013 but they\u2019re there.<\/p>\n

So while I wouldn\u2019t expect a writer who writes about murder to have murderous impulses themselves, I bet they think about conflict a lot. I bet they\u2019ve thought long and hard about moral consequences, about the law, about the logistic of it, and how heavy the burden would weigh on their shoulders. <\/p>\n

Something can\u2019t come from nothing – everything comes from somewhere. And try as a writer might to write to a reader and an audience, I don\u2019t think any writer can get away from writing to themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was a moment the other day when I saw a famous author on twitter point out to everyone that they were not their characters. \u201cIf I was,\u201d they said, \u201cwe\u2019d all be in danger.\u201d This was a joke, of course \u2013 the suggestion was that since a fair share of their characters were murderers… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[38,232,107,168,233,4],"class_list":["post-9102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-fantasy","tag-horrow","tag-orbit-books","tag-robert-jackson-bennett","tag-the-troupe","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n