Stories (and Characters) with Minds of Their Own

[Hope]

I tend to plan...big. One cool dream became the idea for a story. Then a novel. Then a series of novels. The big problem to writing this--other than time, of course--is that the second book definitely is YA, but the first book did not have a YA protagonist. It was the teacher, and the father. The kid between them I imagined to be about 6, preternaturally serious, almost haunted.

Today the kid sat up in my head, announced that he was about a decade older than i'd assumed, and DEFINITELY haunted. I have a protagonist. There's just one catch:

I'm a woman. My closest brother is ten years older, so I have very little memory of his adolescence. I have two daughters. I have no idea at all how to write a 15 or so year old boy.

Josh doesn't care. He blinks his chocolate brown eyes at me, arches one eyebrow, and shrugs. He's not going anywhere. In the midst of my annoyance, i'm starting to worry about him. Should he be that slender? He's only about 5'3"; is the poor kid going to hit puberty during Armageddon? What in the world makes me think a white woman from New England can write about a biracial boy growing up in rural Kentucky?

So...don't even try to tell me your characters and stories don't misbehave this way. I won't believe it. Fess up, and share the pain!

[Chantal]

I've been reading and rereading your above post for a few days, now, and my answer is what I do with my own characters. Whether it works well for me or not, I'm maybe too biased to judge, but here's what I'd do.

I would just let your 15 year-old boy tell his story through you, and I wouldn't worry a bit, at least in the rough draft, whether you are writing him correctly for his gender and background. I would simply let him talk and write down everything he says.

For right now, go with your gut. You can add in the details for realism's sake later. I write a 40-something year-old man with migraines, and I'm neither male nor a migraineur. You can do this. If your character at some point has to milk a cow, you can read up on that, to get the sensory details which will make cow-milking incredibly real. If he encounters prejudice, you can talk to black or biracial people you know, and find out what they've experienced.

I talked to a lot of migraine sufferers when writing Aerden, none of whom ever go off the handle to nearly the degree that he used to--but many of them told me they wished they dared to, that that's how irritable they sometimes feel when they're in that much pain. So, for the character, it might not be 100% realistic, but ideas can work, despite that.

[Chantal]

As for a story with a mind of its own...Yeah. Archon.

I'm writing about my two characters Paul and Seth, father and son. In the first draft, Seth turned out to have fire magic, which caused some problems but didn't justify the Really Awful Thing I was going to have the novel's introductory Bad Guy (the Archon of London) inflict on him. I realized that Seth actually should inherit his father's gift of telepathy and memory manipulation, instead, if I really wanted to cause problems.

But if I do that, I will be looking at one very, very angry 16 year-old who will hate not only his father's line of work, but also himself. This character is normally a very sweet guy, a younger version of D'mir, actually. And I am contemplating doing this to him because I think it will make the story better. At least, I hope it will.

But geeze!

And the thought of what Seth will do when Paul tells him he won't resign from being a mind-sorter...because he doesn't want to; he loves what he does because it is so complex...doesn't even bear thinking about. During the story, of course, he will resign, but he doesn't, initially.

This leads me to wonder how much of a jerk a character cah be before the reader is too disgusted with him to go on? You have to balance out Jerkface with So Fascinating I Must Keep Reading About Him.

It's Paul who I'm worried will disgust people, not Seth. Seth's anger, I think, will be perfectly understandable. Paul is the one who will baffle people, because his own wife, Seth's mother, was mind-wiped (sort of). I don't think readers will understand what attraction Paul's career could possibly hold for him after that. Even Paul sometimes wonders.

I guess I'll just have to work really hard at making Paul as engaging a character as possible.

[geo]

Well, my latest WriMo project features a 17 year old thief who gets his kicks in by stealing valuables from dragon caves.

He's a hopeless romantic, has a really hazy past he can't quit remember, (perhaps it was that pipe he stole one time) and refuses to obey the rules until the suggestion of roast thief gets put on the menu.

He also has quite a bit of growing up left to do and has informed me that he will not go without kicking and screaming. I feel very sorry for the dragon he is going to clash with.

[ginnystar]

I know I had bits of songs run around in my mind, idea that come and go like the tide and much more.

[Kris]

Heh. Hi there! Welcome to my world.

I have three stories where this happened. The first manuscript is set in first-century Imperial Rome, and concerns the friendship between a young businessman of nonexistent ethics and a noble family, headed by the war-hero husband, the shrewd and cultured wife, and their five hellion boys. When I first started this, the protagonist (the businessman) was the husband's best friend. Then sometime in 2007, the protagonist says, "No, wait, I'm just 19, and stepping into a role I'm really unprepared for. Oh, and by the way, do you know the shrewd and cultured wife haunts my dreams in ways that you can't discuss on a PG-13 website?"

Yeesh. Back to the drawing board, especially to figure out how Shrewd Cultured Wife, on figuring out her hot young private detective has it bad for her, deals with the subject, especially with War Hero Husband away at the provinces so often.

Second manuscript: my Talarian Chronicles, an epic fantasy. The protagonist used to be the son of a minor provincial chieftain who leads a popular uprising. Then he became a prince. Thanks to a dream I had that turned my view of the story upside-down, his society became a matrilineal one, and instead of inheriting the kingdom, he became his older sister's right-hand man. Now I recently found out he's going to be claimed by a deity. Literally. And not in the, "I'm choosing you for a higher purpose" sense.

The third manuscript . . . yikes. Originally it was a pitch to a publishing company for a lighthearted supernatural romance. So when the angel half of the couple turns out to be one of the Nephilim (aka "fallen angels"), I have to start rethinking whether I really want to pitch *this* story to this particular publisher, or if I'd rather grab my new idea and work on it myself.