As my sister and I talk about the stories weāre writing and storytelling methods and how itās goingāIām learning what she means when she says āthe character didnāt want to do that.ā
My rigid approach is, the character does what I want it to do. I made the character. I wrote the scene. The characterās not real, itās my puppet, I make it move, I change anything about it that I want for whatever reason I want.
And in one sense, thatās 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 isnāt anything on that page.
And I can write like that. But if you have any experience writing, maybe youāre learning like Iām beginning toāif the character never ābecomes realā to you in your imaginationāif 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 theyād do and your imagination just feels like itās watching what theyād do, subconsciouslyā
āif that never happens, and youāre just choosing what the character does based on what you want, and thereās no solid traits, nothing that canāt be bent to your whim-of-the-momentā
āIf thatās how it is, you know how that character will turn out. You know what itāll be to audiences, to yourself as you write it. Youāve seen the type in other peopleās poor products.
The character wonāt feel genuine.
Itās where you get the examples of Mary-Sues. When writers stop knowing āwho the real character is,ā and it is just a face-claim puppet for whatever the writer is feeling the momentāwhat 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 characterās made from the Author. It canāt be apart from the Author. Itās not realāexcept in the sense that it can be genuine.
ā¦ā¦annnd that, God help me, is how Iām starting to reconcile the idea of āfreeā will.
God couldāve made us automatonsāand there is still no sense in which anything that happens is āoutsideā His sovereigntyā¦and, He didnāt do that. We live. We make real choices. We want things. Sometimes things He wouldnāt 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 wouldnāt be genuine, real, without it. We wouldnāt be able to choose Him, either. We wouldnāt 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 itāand, weāre real.
I know Iām rambling and I know this isnāt theologically airtight. But honestly, I donāt expect to be able to defend it to anyone who hasnāt tried to figure out thisā¦ āthe character doesnāt āwantā to do that thing in the scene Iām trying to writeā 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 givenāeven if thereās āgloryā on the other sideāwhen He could have made it easier, if Heās so powerful, or kept us from choosing evil. The problem of evil.
And thatās the whole thing. He appears to have not done that because if He had, we wouldnāt 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 whoās taking a Character from Point A in the storyāI just canāt wait to be king and have everything my wayāto Point B in the storyāI donāt get to decide Iām a lazy self-indulgent waste out in the woods when Iām 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 Bābut this way, the character was real and the pain had a point. Without genuine, true charactersāwhich inevitably lead to conflictāthereās no story. Storytellers can hold both.
