Your Characters Should be Weak

It's been nearly two months since my last post and for that I am sorry. If you'd like to know what happened to me, ask my captors: homework and life. Also, I was attacked by giant flaming hail stones. I don't want to talk about it.

Anywho, I realized something ridiculously important yesterday as I lamented over the blandness of the main character of my novel.

Have you ever read a book about two orphan sisters? The older one sacrifices everything to make sure the younger one is provided for and lives as normal of a life as possible. As a result, the younger one has a semi-decent life with friends that love her and she doesn't realize how lucky she is to have a sister like this bla, bla, bla. Meanwhile the older sister has absolutely no life, no friends, no personality because she really never got a chance to develop as a person. Eventually, the older sister begins to resent her younger sister so much, she loses her mind and takes to dressing up in a platypus costume and murdering people with sporks.



My book is nothing like that.




However, that is a perfect metaphor for what's happening. You see, the little sister is the surrounding elements of my novel. The plot, the supporting characters, the setting etc. The older sister is my main character. My main character is the life line for the rest of the book. She pushes the plot forward and creates the situations. That's not the way to go about a novel if you want fully developed characters. My character has become a shell, bending to my will. All my other characters argue with me when I try to make them do something they wouldn't normally do, but not my main character. She does whatever I say.

 Here lies the issue. All this time I've been breaking my own rule: Authors create, not control. So, I started over with my main character. I let her react and do whatever she wanted to do without trying to keep her moving toward some goal. I put her in this really odd situation and just wrote her reactions. I found something that a million character sketches couldn't ever help me find. I found her voice.

I once said to put yourself in your character's shoes, but I retract that statement. Maybe, we should just be our character's scribes and let them do all the work.