Tag Archives: Writing

When Characters Derail the Plot

My characters have a pesky habit of doing things I didn’t expect them to – especially when they’re talking to each other. Frankly, it’s kind of annoying and I wish they’d quit it, but they never listen to me any more than they listen to each other. It makes it very difficult to plan a conversation that advances the plot, because they don’t care which way the story goes, especially if they haven’t said their piece yet.

When I’m writing more plot-driven fantasy, like The Redemption of Erâth, it’s mildly infuriating because there are plenty of dialogue scenes that are required to explain a plot point or give some back story. It’s fine when it’s mostly one character relating events that happened to them, but when I need characters to come to a realization or change the nature of their relationship (fight, fall in love, etc.), they just don’t do what I want or expect.

When I’m writing heavily character-driven fiction, such as my YA novel 22 Scars (as C.M. North), it becomes a major pain in the ass, because the entire story hinges on people in the book saying the things that they need to say to get to the next plot point … and sometimes, they just don’t.

The problem is in keeping the back and forth of the dialogue realistic. It just doesn’t work out to have conversations like this:

Character A: “Relinquish her, you fiend!”
Character B: “Never, sir! Prepare to die!”
Character A: “Prepare thyself!”
*Fight begins because really that’s what this was all getting at in the first place*

My dialogue tends to go more like this:

Character A: “Relinquish her, you fiend!”
Character B: “Never, sir! Prepare to die!”
Character A: “Oh. That’s a rather intense threat. Maybe we should talk about this.”
Character B: “Speak what thou wilst.”
Character A: “Well you see, it looks like you aren’t treating my friend here with all that much respect, and I think you’d find yourself in a significantly happier relationship if you took a moment to listen to what she has to say.”
Character C: “I’ve been telling you all along, I’m not unhappy, I just want to be heard! You come home every day from pillaging and burning villages and you track mud all over my tapestries, and I just want you to appreciate what I do for you!”
Character B: “Hm. I think I could do that.”
Character A: “Now, isn’t that better?”

Okay, so this isn’t a great example, but it serves to illustrate how my characters, especially in dialogue, tend to take on a life of their own and drive the direction of the story in ways I never anticipated.

It makes overall plotting difficult, and I’m not a pantser. I structure my stories meticulously before beginning to write, and when I’m writing narrative passages, action sequences or even just single-character scenes, things tend to flow pretty smoothly. As soon as these characters have to interact with each other, though, things go bat-shit crazy. I have a scene I’m working on at the moment where a young man confronts his abusive father, and it’s ended up at a point where the young man is threatening the father with the broken neck of a bottle. I didn’t think that was going to happen, and I can’t see a way out of it without sending the father to the hospital, which is really going to derail the plot, because it’s going to require a police report, possibly a trial, and a whole lot of nonsense that isn’t relevant to the story. I just needed them to have a fight – the bottle was never supposed to be part of the scene, but I’ll be damned if the kid didn’t just up and snatch it.

Anyway, the point is that I find writing dialogue difficult, but perhaps not for the reason most people do. I don’t have too much difficulty writing believable dialogue, but rather the opposite: in making it too realistic, I can’t control its direction very well.

For those of you who write, what’s your experience in writing dialogue? Can you manage to convey the points necessary within your control, or do you find that, like me, the characters tend to do what they want?

A World of Possibilities

When I’m not writing (which is most of the time), I have a job – a profession; a career, so to speak. I recently changed roles in my company, and although I’m really not looking for other jobs, I took the opportunity to make a few changes to my LinkedIn profile, update my status, etc.

It reminded me of a few years ago, when I started considering writing as a viable career option (I’m still not sure if it is, to be perfectly honest), and I was looking to create a LinkedIn profile for myself as an author. You see, whilst I do have a professional account for my ‘real’ job, I work for a reasonably high-profile company, and as such I have to be careful about what I say and do outside of work, in case it appears as representative of my company. Given that the job of ‘author’ is essentially about speaking my mind and telling the truth as I see it, this could potentially cause a conflict with my position at work, and that’s not something I’m willing to compromise.

The problem is this: LinkedIn have a very strict policy regarding multiple accounts. Although I could, yes, create a second, unrelated account for myself as a writer, if LinkedIn were able to connect the two accounts (via profile information, IP addresses, or whatever), not only could I lose both, but I could be banned from LinkedIn entirely. A LinkedIn profile, it seems, is directly tied to an individual person, and all the professional things that individual does.

With a world of possibilities, it seems society is still geared to catering to just one at a time.

The fundamental flaw in this setup is that it really caters to an outdated, linear view of career progression: that you move from job to job, company to company, and you don’t start one career until you’re done with another. This is fine if your career is your life, but I think that, for the majority of people, their passion in life lies often outside of what they do for a living. And whilst many of those people will never act on their passion, for those that do – for those who want to make a career out of passion, and not just skill – there’s very little opportunity to build a profile around your passion whilst still working a day job.

I’ll give you an example: let’s say you’ve worked for a globally-recognized coffee brand for fifteen years. You’ve worked your way up the corporate ladder, from employee to manager to district or maybe even regional director, and you aren’t really in a position to give that up. But on the side, you really, really love drawing political cartoons. Maybe you’ve sold a few – under a pseudonym – and it looks like a promising opportunity. But until you are able to match your $75K salary from drawing, you can’t quit your main job. And for as long as you work for a major brand, you can’t be seen to publicly affiliate with any one political view or another, for fear of representing the entire brand.

What do you do? With a world of possibilities, it seems society is still geared to catering to just one at a time. I can’t represent myself professionally as a writer and an employee, and so I’m forced to choose between one career or the other. Everything I do on one side has to be carefully and meticulously kept separate from the other. The corporate me, the writer me, and even the musician me, can’t really coexist.

Even within writing, I’ve chosen to keep two identities – because my fantasy work is so very different to my YA/literary work. And while I don’t really mind ‘cross-contamination’ – I’ll happily reference both sets of work on here or on cmnorthauthor.com – it’s another example of how society simply doesn’t expect an individual person to have multiple passions, careers, or possibilities. Imagine if Stephen King tried to sell and market a beach-bum romance novel; under his real name people would simply be confused, but by adopting a pseudonym (as he did with Richard Bachman, for example) he can publish genres that would typically be considered outside of his wheelhouse.

It does make life frustrating at times, however; I try to commit to writing under both Satis and C.M. North, but time is prohibitive, and managing two blogs is twice the effort of managing one. I have two Instagram accounts, two Twitter accounts … the list goes on.

In the end, I don’t want to sacrifice my passion or my vision to practicality – however tempting – and so I have little choice but to soldier on as both Satis and C.M. North, as well as a professional representative of a major corporation, and simply hope my paths remain parallel.

What are the limitations of your pursuits? What stops you from putting your all into one thing or another? Or are you able to combine your career with your passion, and get everything done in one go?

Unintentional Parallels in Storytelling

One of the great things about writing fantasy is the amount of research needed to write a convincing story: i.e., very little. I don’t necessarily need to learn about how medieval feudal society worked in detail, because I can always just say that, well, my society is different.

Of course, even in fantasy there are advantages to research nonetheless; depending on how convincing you want your fantasy to be – and in particular how close to a real-world setting you intend it – it can be worth seeing how you can parallel ideas, concepts and actions from the real world in your own writing. For example, in The Redemption of Erâth, there is a lot of travel involved between towns, cities and countries, over vast distances, often by foot or by horse. It was important to me to set realistic timescales for these travels, so I looked into average paces for wilderness walking and riding to estimate how long it would take to travel, say, a hundred miles.

Similarly, when discussing things like ships, or sailing, I wanted to keep to a realistic sense of being on a sailing vessel, so I researched terminology, techniques and concepts when on the water.

However, the story and plot itself – in any fiction – is pure invention, of course; except that it really isn’t, because it’s impossible to deny the influence that other writing has on your own. In writing The Redemption of Erâth, I knew I would be drawing heavily on influences from classic fantasy such as The Lord of the Rings – more stylistically than anything – but within the realm of my own imagination. When I invented giant, dark wolves called fierundé, I knew of course they were a parallel to Tolkien’s wargs. The starting point of the series, Consolation, is a parallel for the Shire. Even the great city of Erârün, Vira Weitor, is a parallel for Minas Tirith.

But those were conscious decisions I made, drawing on what I held dear in my love of fantasy, and paying homage to the great ideas of the past. What I’ve discovered over time, though, is that there are often unintentional parallels, too – similarities between my writing and something else that I was entirely unaware of. The parallels, of course, can be between my fiction and another fiction, but sometimes something in the very real world crops up and makes me remember that truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction.

For example: this morning while browsing Reddit, I came across an article about a disease called African trypanosomiasis – also referred to as ‘sleeping sickness’. It’s passed on by tsetse flies, and amongst the symptoms are disrupted sleep cycles, fever, aches and pains. For those of you who’ve read the first part of book three, Ancients & Death, you’ll be aware that in the world of Erâth there is a disease called the ‘Sleeping Death’, which – you guessed it – comes with fever, aches and pains, before the victim ultimately passes into sleep and never wakes up.

Now there are significant differences between the two diseases – one real and one fictional – but the parallels are nonetheless uncanny. And would you believe, I had never heard of sleeping sickness before this morning.

In the time since I’ve been writing, I’ve come across other parallels, too. In writing my YA novel 22 Scars, I thought a story focusing on depression and self-harm would be pretty unique. After finishing and publishing it, I discovered many others: Scars, by Cheryl Rainfield, Cut by Patricia McCormick, Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, and quite a few others as well. I hadn’t heard of any of these books before writing my own.

It’s a funny thing, and can be a bit discouraging sometimes, because of course we all want to think our ideas are the most original, unique ones out there that nobody else could have thought of. Of course, real life isn’t about that; when you really break it down, every story has already been told in its base essence – tragedy, comedy, etc. – but the details are what make it your own. Because with nearly eight billion people in the world, the likelihood of two individuals’ stories being similar is pretty high. On the flip side, it also means your story – the one you have to tell – is one in eight billion. And that’s pretty unique.

So in the end, I try not to worry about the parallels, or the things that seems like influence, copying or even plagiarism, because I know my influences and I know my inventions. I’m quite open about the deliberate parallels, and have nothing to hide; I just find the unintentional ones fascinating, because how can my mind invent something that, as it turns out, already exists?

The world is a strange and wonderful place, indeed.