Schizophrenic Characters and Other Nonsense

To paraphrase the rest of the Tri Mu. “Schizophrenia is not a flaw you should cultivate in your characters.”

Unfortunately, I did this in my current WIP.

In truth, Austin (the name of my hero) didn’t have schizophrenia so much as he had bipolar disorder. In five pages, he went from morbidly depressed to confidently flirty. Hmmmm….No logical jump in between the two either.

Writing is hard. Writing characters with a consistent and believable personality is even harder. As writers, we have people living in our heads (or chickens as the case may be). We know these people. They may or may not talk to us, but we know them. We know their age, their favorite colors, what they like to eat and what they would rather not eat. Some of us have spent years building a world for them to reside.

If I told most of my non-writing friends and family what happens inside my head, they would stage an intervention.

But we know our characters almost as well as we know ourselves. We know who we want them to be and who they have been in the past. So sometimes we know them better than we know ourselves. Prior to editing my first draft, I knew Austin and I loved him. He was flirty and genial. The perfect foil to my sarcastic and slightly depressed heroine.

But somewhere along the line I decided that I had fallen into the perfect hero trap. That he was too perfect to actually exist and that if I were ever going to sell my novel, Austin needed flaws. So I gave him one. A fiancé that died in a tragic accident that he caused. I amped up the guilt and the depression. It was great and I loved the scene. But then, I had to get the heroine and the hero together on the same page and well, it didn’t work.

Flashes of Austin as I knew him before kept coming through onto the page and by the second time I wrote from his perspective, I’d lost the guilt and depression over the dead fiancé.

I knew that I had problems so I let the Tri Mu read what I had completed and even, they agreed that Austin had a mental stability issue. (Thus, the quote at the beginning of this post.)

Characters don’t like it when writers tell them what to do. In this situation, I tried to tell Austin to be depressed and guilty. He disagreed. Non-writers say “You’re the writer. You get to tell the characters how to behave.” Maybe other writers can do this. I can’t. I guess that I’m a character driven writer. I don’t create the character to suit the plot. I create the plot to suit the character. I will have to accept this about myself.

I’ve decided to resort back to my original Austin. He’s happier now that I’ve decided to do this and the words are coming to the page again. And he’s not perfect. He never was, but don’t tell him I said that.

Sorry, I Can’t Write Today; I’ve Lost My Voice

Every character in every story ever written has a voice. No matter what perspective in which the story is written -- from the completely devoted first person to the distant third person omniscient -- every character has his or her own way of speaking. The concept of “voice” in writing is a confusing one, but it’s also very important. In fact, I would go so far as to say the voice of a story is the most important part. More important than even the plot in some cases.

Because when it comes right down to it, no one cares what happens to a character they don’t really want to listen to. And we’ve all opened a novel or read a magazine article and thought “I love this chick! She’s hilarious!” When that happens, we usually aren’t talking about the author; we’re talking about that sassy character that just walked onto the bar and threw a drink into some guy’s face because she misunderstood what he just said and thought he called her fat. No worries, she thinks. You don’t get to be twenty-eight without doing something worth getting doused in strawberry margarita. And just like that you’re hooked.

If you’re writing a story from multiple perspectives, every one of them needs to have a different voice; no two people think exactly the same way and so no two characters can be written in exactly the same way. It’s this concept of creating multiple voices within a story that frequently gives me troubles. I’m finding as I go through Memories that my voices need a little tweaking.

In what is probably a horrendous practice for a writer, I’ve taken to making up words for problems I notice in my writing while I’m going through revisions. I know I should be articulate and a wordsmith and perfectly capable of using the appropriate word, but sometimes made up words are just easier. And they’re more fun to blog about. ;-) Quite a few of my made up words have to do with voice. Here are a few of my favorite examples:

Skitzovoice: This is what happens when characters who are not suffering from the mental disorder of schizophrenia suddenly start thinking like they are. Halfway through the book, their personality drastically changes for no apparent reason, usually explained by my taking on another project or taking too long a break in the middle of the writing. By the time I come back to it, I’m not actually writing the same character anymore. It also happens when I don’t really have a clear picture of the character in my head, so their personality bends to the situation, rather than bending their perception of the situation. This can be disconcerting for the reader, to say the least, who doesn’t usually know or care where I was in my writing process when the character went all wonky.

Blendyvoice: Every character in the story begins to sound the same. No one has their own quirks or accents. This usually happens when my distance is wrong. I’m too far away from the characters and so I’m not getting a clear picture of them. As a result, I’m telling a story, not showing one, and it’s not very compelling that way. The worst ‘blendyvoice’ for me is when all the characters start talking like me. As a writer, I don’t generally consider myself interesting; that’s why I make up other people who have interesting lives. I don’t do them or the reader any favors by stripping them of their individuality and turning them all into little mes. (‘Mes’? Really? I’m just not having a good English day, am I?)

Annoyingvoice: This one seems pretty self-explanatory to me. Characters with ‘annoyingvoice’ don’t last very long. Their voice irritates me and I hate listening to them. While writing a character that inspires a visceral response is usually a good one, it takes a stronger writer than me to put up with a character induces migraines brought on by excessive teeth-grinding for very long. Maybe they’re excessively whiny or they do a lot of shrieking or they are over-fond of things like “Ugh” and “Sigh”. When a character like this pops into my head, it’s actually impressive if they last until revisions. They usually get killed off after a couple of pages and then eventually written out of the story completely.

Now sometimes these voice “mistakes” are good. Sometimes as a writer you have to do things that don’t make sense in order to get your point across. Maybe your character is mentally unbalanced, traumatized by some event in the story or trying to be something they’re not. In that case, ‘skitzovoice’ can work very well to demonstrate that. If you want to show two characters growing closer together -- by supernatural means or just through the general development of their relationship -- a little ‘blendyvoice’ is called for. If you really want the bad guy’s henchmen to get under the reader’s skin (and make it totally forgivable when you kill them off in a spectacular fashion) ‘annoyingvoice’ could be a way to accomplish that. NOTE: I don’t recommend it for the Big Bad, though. If my main villain ever suffered from ‘annoyingvoice’, I would likely never finish the book, as I would dread sitting down to write it.

As with everything, from the consumption of sweets to the harmonizing of multiple voices, the answer lies in the concept of moderation. A little ‘blendyvoice’ is okay, if the situation calls for it. ‘Skitzovoice’ isn’t bad, so long as it doesn’t indicate that you don’t really know your characters all that well. Just don’t overdo it. All you have to do is find the right balance. It’s as simple as that.

Riiiiiiiiight.

Do you really want to be in my novel? Really?

I have a sticker that I got during Nano last year hanging in my cube (yes, I’m a cube farm dweller) at my day job. It says “Be nice to me or I’ll put you in my novel.” I like the sticker, but let me tell you that I have never put a single real person in my novel. Not once. There have been some people that I have been tempted to put in my novel and then have them die a horrible, horrible death, but I’ve never actually done it.

Its not even that I wouldn’t put real people in my novel or that I don’t want to put real people in my novel. It is that I can’t put them in my novel. I can start off with real people, but the characters tend to take on a life of their own and become unique in my head.

True story. About 10 years ago now, my father’s mother told me that my grandfather used to write her letters during World War II. One of them was on a roll of butcher paper. They weren’t really “dating” before the war, but when he came home they got married almost immediately. My father was born September 21, 1946, if that tells you anything.

I thought this was a great story so I resolved to write it as fiction. I planned on using my grandparents as characters. Almost immediately, my mind started twisting the story and the characters, supposedly based on my grandparents, in my head. My main female character is now pregnant by my main male character’s deceased cousin and my main male character is going to suffer a horrible wound in Africa. None of that actually happened. My grandmother joined the WAVES and served as a weapons inspector in Washington. My grandfather served until the end of the war, fighting in Africa, Italy, and France. He was a sergeant in the 2nd Armored Division and served under Patton. Even more than what happened to my characters is that my characters don’t act or think like my grandparents thought. This may be a good thing because who wants their grandparents or parents living in their heads like my characters do.

I haven’t written this book yet, but I still intend to. The novel that I wrote last year during Nano set up the world in which I’m going to put these characters. Maybe I’ll write in 2009 and dedicate it to my grandparents and their great stories, but then again maybe not.

My advice to anyone that asks an author to put them in their novel is…..Be afraid….Be very afraid. Because writers like to torture their characters and you might wind up pregnant, alone, poor, and trapped on an alien planet with only a dog that shifts into man form during full moons for a companion.