My Novel's Characters Are Better Writers Than Me

A lamentation? A praise?

Hello, friends! I, of course, owe you all a substantial apology for not posting here in quite a long time. Life, you know? Excuses, you know?

No, I won’t bore you with the excuses and the “life is just so busy” rant. You’ve heard it before. Instead just…sorry.

And with that, we just pick up where we left off! Well, sort of. We left off with a podcast episode about characterization and how I believe that character-driven stories are so incredible. Vibrant, dynamic, memorable characters are the lifeblood of a narrative!

So, I come to you today with an interesting take on characters. As some of you know, I’m currently writing a novel. In that novel, one of my characters is trying his hand at writing poetry. Now, poetry is a difficult thing to write (in my opinion) and it has always eluded me.

Yet, when I step into the mind of this character that is writing these poems for specific purposes, the words just…flow.

Okay - for those of you that are still here after that cliche and ridiculous thing I just said, hear me out. I know that I am the first person to ridicule the idea of how stories just tend to “write themselves” and how characters are “alive” and they have their own thoughts and ideas and…

But like…I’m starting to believe it.

Okay so NOW for those of you brave souls that are STILL here after that…first of all, thank you. Second, consider the idea that whatever poetry my character writes, I am still its author. Right? Well, for some reason, it doesn’t feel that way. For example, here is an excerpt from some poetry that I’ve ACTUALLY written:

Sinister sounds enraptured my senses,
And the cold of night blew my defenses.
	The fear peaked as the darkness grew.
	Where, oh where, was the wretched brew?
The forest, teeming with fiery eyes,
Was dark, gleaming with fiery lies.
	I stepped slowly, maybe out of my mind,
	Into blackness of the most unpleasant kind.

OH, DEAR LORD.

That looks like it was written by a child in elementary school with a rhyming dictionary and a pocketful of Sweet Tarts.

It is bad. It is nothing but quite bad. Yes, I wrote it quite a long time ago, but it is still something that I wrote down of my own accord. And I was also proud of it at some point!

In contrast, here is an excerpt written by the character in my novel:

Shift in and out of my life like stars,
Gleaming brightly, yet seeming so far.
Your mind is foreign, and yet your scars,
Trace the same patterns as mine,
Breach the same barriers,
Preach the same solemn sermons,
Like stencils laid atop one another. 

Now, you tell me that that is written by the same person that wrote that absolute rubbish before!

When writers wax poetic (lol to everyone that gets why that is funny) about how their stories write themselves and their characters act on their own and we just sort of record what they are doing, my first instinct was always to scoff. Because, how could that be? The author is still the author. The characters don’t actually have free will - their stories are being written by another.

This, of course, can lead us down the rabbit hole of free will and how we could also just be characters in a story that someone is writing. Wild, right? The characters in my novel don’t “know” they are characters in a novel. To them, they are just living the lives that we are reading about. In the same way, maybe we are just living the lives that someone else is reading about.

The whole “my characters write better poetry than me” thing has me even further down this rabbit hole because for the first time, I am starting to feel separate from them. Throughout this whole novel-writing process, I have felt in control. It’s mine. I own it.

But, what if that is just an illusion? Am I an author that dictates my characters’ lives, or am I a scribe that just records events as they are happening? It’s a bit like dreaming, isn’t it? When we dream, are those “realities” actually “real?” Those of you that know my wife know that this would be the point where she would quote Dumbledore and said, “Of course it is happening in your head, Harry. But why on Earth should that mean that it is not real?”

In any case, the takeaways or the TLDR of this are: my characters are better writers than me and that may or may not mean that they exist in a separate plane of existence than I do. Of course, this may also just mean that I am crazy and is all the more reason for me to get the book done as quickly as possible so that it doesn’t get worse. Let me know what you think in the comments!