As my sister and I talk about the stories we’re writing and storytelling methods and how it’s going—I’m learning what she means when she says “the character didn’t want to do that.”
My rigid approach is, the character does what I want it to do. I made the character. I wrote the scene. The character’s not real, it’s my puppet, I make it move, I change anything about it that I want for whatever reason I want.
And in one sense, that’s true. That will always be true. Without me, the Author, there is no character. No setting it exists in. No action it takes. No expression it makes. No nothing. No story at all. Without me, there isn’t anything on that page.
And I can write like that. But if you have any experience writing, maybe you’re learning like I’m beginning to—if the character never ‘becomes real’ to you in your imagination—if you never get a sense of what would and would not be in-character for them, to where you stop consciously having to mull over what they’d do and your imagination just feels like it’s watching what they’d do, subconsciously—
—if that never happens, and you’re just choosing what the character does based on what you want, and there’s no solid traits, nothing that can’t be bent to your whim-of-the-moment—
—If that’s how it is, you know how that character will turn out. You know what it’ll be to audiences, to yourself as you write it. You’ve seen the type in other people’s poor products.
The character won’t feel genuine.
It’s where you get the examples of Mary-Sues. When writers stop knowing ‘who the real character is,’ and it is just a face-claim puppet for whatever the writer is feeling the moment—what the character wanted yesterday when the author sat down to write a breakup scene is forgotten today when the author sits down to write a soccer match.
The character’s made from the Author. It can’t be apart from the Author. It’s not real—except in the sense that it can be genuine.
……annnd that, God help me, is how I’m starting to reconcile the idea of “free” will.
God could’ve made us automatons—and there is still no sense in which anything that happens is “outside” His sovereignty…and, He didn’t do that. We live. We make real choices. We want things. Sometimes things He wouldn’t exactly want us to have or do.
We can even not want Him.
Why would He make us? Why would He give us any kind of will, knowing it would stray from Him?
Because we wouldn’t be genuine, real, without it. We wouldn’t be able to choose Him, either. We wouldn’t be able to make choices, either.
He does orchestrate everything toward the culmination of His own will, and the end of the story He wants to tell, and it will all work out exactly as He plans it—and, we’re real.
I know I’m rambling and I know this isn’t theologically airtight. But honestly, I don’t expect to be able to defend it to anyone who hasn’t tried to figure out this… “the character doesn’t ‘want’ to do that thing in the scene I’m trying to write” paradox.
I mostly thought about this while I was thinking about people who dislike the idea of Yahweh because He supposedly forces people to live a life where evil and pain are a given—even if there’s ’glory’ on the other side—when He could have made it easier, if He’s so powerful, or kept us from choosing evil. The problem of evil.
And that’s the whole thing. He appears to have not done that because if He had, we wouldn’t have had the ability to choose. When we choose, and the evil is a consequence, He weaves it into good in the big picture.
Like a storyteller who’s taking a Character from Point A in the story—I just can’t wait to be king and have everything my way—to Point B in the story—I don’t get to decide I’m a lazy self-indulgent waste out in the woods when I’m made to be a self-sacrificial, responsible King who protects others. There has to be a dead father and broken childhood and the betrayal of loved ones to get from point A to point B—but this way, the character was real and the pain had a point. Without genuine, true characters—which inevitably lead to conflict—there’s no story. Storytellers can hold both.
