In Today’s Journal
* Faux Interview, Part 4
* Of Interest
Faux Interview, Part 4
- Why teach writing publicly after spending decades learning it privately?
I learned it “privately” even as many of my students learn it privately, but I learned it from various sources outside of myself just as they do: other fiction writers and poets, books and seminars on writing, and most importantly from my own process as I practice.
Why teach it publicly? Because I enjoy helping other writers cut their learning curve.
- Teaching forces a writer to articulate instincts that may otherwise remain subconscious. Has teaching changed the way you understand your own writing process, and have questions from other writers ever caused you to reconsider something you thought you already understood?
Absolutely. Of course.
That’s one reason I love to teach and one reason I love questions. To me, the question is the most important word grouping in the language. Not because it leads to answers, but because it stirs thought and leads to other questions.
Every time I answer a question or write something new, my craft is enhanced and refined with new knowledge and new realizations.
- Your recent journal also discusses scene construction in very specific terms, including the use of the six senses from the viewpoint character’s perspective. What makes a scene feel lived rather than merely described? For example,
- A writer can tell us what a room looks like, but a character experiences more than sight.
- They hear something.
- Smell something.
- Feel the texture of something.
- Taste something.
- Experience physical sensations.
- And, perhaps most importantly, feel something emotionally.
Right. So if you want the scene to “feel lived” you write all of that down as it happens… as the character’s living it.
- How consciously do you think about those sensory elements while writing?
I do my best not to think consciously about anything while I’m writing. Nothing in the story is for me to decide. My only task is to record the story for posterity, exactly as it happened.
- Does Writing Into the Dark mean allowing the viewpoint character to experience the scene naturally and trusting those details to appear?
I don’t “trust details to appear.” I simply write the details that DO appear as the POV character notices those details.
- You write that the characters—not the writer—are actually living the story.
Of course.
After all, the writer isn’t deep underground mining coal or on the deck of a ship being pitched about in heavy seas or creeping silently through a dark house at 2 a.m. to effect a paid assassination. The characters are doing that in their story, the story they’re living.
Meanwhile, in his own life-story, the writer is sitting alone in a room making stuff up. That’s the writer’s story. What the writer is putting on the page is the characters’ story.
- What does it mean for a fictional character to become real to the writer?
I think it’s a decision the writer has to make. I’ve always considered my characters real. Whether they live in my creative subconscious or on an alternate Earth or in an alternate universe or in a different dimension doesn’t matter to me. They exist in their story in their world and they’ve given me access to observe them and write what happens, so that’s what I do. And I feel extremely fortunate about that.
- At some point, experienced writers often stop thinking of characters as pieces on a board.
I never think of them as pieces on a board. I never have and I never will. I simply record their stories as they live them.
- They know what a character would say.
I sometimes know what I think my characters might say in a given situation, but I never know what they “will” say until they say it.
- They know what the character would refuse to do.
Given that a character has displayed certain moral fortitude, I expect what a character might or might not do, but I never know for sure until he does it.
Here’s an example:
Wes Crowley’s guiding principle was “Upright is not a matter of degree. In every moment, you either are or you aren’t.”
So if he did something contrary to that principle, it would surprise me because it wouldn’t be in his ‘character’ to do anything contrary to that principle. However, he’s also only human, so he might lose his temper, etc. and act in a way that’s contrary to how he normally acts.
Of course, that also depends on how the character defines “upright.”
Another of Crowley’s guiding principles is that he “carries his jurisdiction” with him no matter where he happens to be. That makes sense to Wes and it makes sense to me because he’s still a lawman no matter whether he’s within his official jurisdiction or not. So apparently being willing to act without legal authority does not, for him, fly in the face of being “upright.”
- They know what would make that character angry, frightened, embarrassed or hopeful.
To some degree, yes. We at least suspect or believe we know those things, but how much we actually know depends on how well we know the character.
It’s no different than encountering a human being you’ve never met before. At first he’s only a stereotype. If your subliminal, unconscious fight-or-flight response doesn’t kick in when you first encounter him and you hang around, you will get to know him slowly just as we get to know humans slowly in real life.
- But is that simply deep character understanding?
Of course. The longer you know somebody and the more they reveal to you of their personality and their personal quirks, the better you at least believe you understand them.
- When a character surprises you, do you interpret that as the subconscious revealing something you already knew about the character or as genuine discovery?
In every case, it’s genuine discovery. We never know everything even about ourselves, much less about other people (including our characters). So of course what they do or say should surprise us at least occasionally.