In that case I stand corrected - this discussion isn't a matter of differing interpretations if you have personal insight.
Thanks for the advice !
The Grief of "Full Circle" (and other thoughts)
- Thread starter CNash
- Start date
In that case I stand corrected - this discussion isn't a matter of differing interpretations if you have personal insight.
Thanks for the advice !
Hello Friends,
So...yeah.
I've already explained and thanks to Christopher for finding and posting my quote from a few years ago...my thoughts on the character choices I was faced with in Full Circle. But just so you're getting it from the horse's mouth so to speak...
It's really never a question of my personal feelings about these things the way it would be for someone who doesn't have to do this job. Here's the sad truth...I am now constitutionally incapable of reading anyone else's Trek work and just enjoying it the way I used to when I was just a fan of the stories. Much in the same way it became difficult for me to enjoy a lot of television or movies or plays once I had begun a thorough study of and done lots of work as an actor. It's an occupational hazzard. Once you begin to do these things yourself, your brain does something weird when you are reading or watching. You're not just suspending your disbelief and going along for the ride. You're seeing choices consciously made by the writers or actors and asking yourself if you would have made the same choice, especially if you don't find the choice really compelling. You see the structure. You see when stuff is moving organically and when it's being forced along out of necessity. You can't help it. It's like once you know how a magician does a trick, the trick can't amaze you anymore. You might respect it as a good trick, but you can't experience it the way you did before you knew how it was done.
Yes, every once in a great while a book or a movie or a tv show gets past my weird brain the first time I see it and sucks me in. That's when I know I'm in the middle of something fantastic and I usually just fasten my seatbelt and go with it. Then, after the first time, I usually go back at it a few times and let myself try to see the nuts and bolts so that I can learn from it. But most of the time, I'm trying to figure out how it works, why it works, why it doesn't, and if there's anything there I need to file away for later use. It's also probably why most of the time when I'm reading for pure pleasure these days, I'm reading non-fiction.
So, to ask if I like these characters or Golden's work is something I can never answer for you now because I never really got to think about them in those terms. In my brain, they were always part of the work I was doing and were therefore catalogued as what I could or would need to use and what I wouldn't.
Looking back now, I think most of what those of you who feel these character resolutions were needlessly or callously rushed are sensing has less to do with those characters specifically and more to do with the scope of the undertaking. Some of them might have had more time had Full Circle been the two novels I had originally intended rather than one. You're talking about 70,000 words...which in some cases is a full Trek novel (though not so much anymore)...worth of material that had to go. And you should also bear in mind that we also had Janeway, her death, Chakotay, Tom, B'Elanna, Harry, Tuvok, the Doctor, Seven and a handful of critical to the ongoing story new characters like Eden, Batiste and Cambridge who required lots of attention. That right there is more than enough for a book the size of Full Circle to track. Then we're also covering almost three years of time which only makes it harder to spend time anywhere but with these main characters.
Once I knew how we were moving forward, I put my focus there. More time might have been spent with the others had this project come together differently, but even I can't tell you now how exactly that would have worked or if you would have felt their deaths or departures less harsh.
And finally, I'll say this about poor Akolo Tare. Christie did deal with the rape issue. She showed it happening and gave us a taste of its initial aftermath. Tare didn't die until almost two years later in real universe time but you should assume that as she was still doing her job, and quite well in the scenes we saw her in before she died, that she found some way of dealing with her personal tragedy in a healthy way. Perhaps it would have been interesting to take the time and show exactly how that happened for her but the plate was already pretty full initially with Tom and B'Elanna's story, and the immediate aftermath of Janeway's death.
Is something like this an issue Trek should tackle? Why not? I prefer to come at these things a little more obliquely, however. In some ways I think the issues Seven was dealing with both in the manner of Janeway's death and her transformation by the Caeliar covers some of the same ground, though perhaps in a less direct way.
And finally, as it related to ths holographic rights issue, I was explicily asked by my editor to allow that particular thread to trail off as he felt, and I actually agree, that despite the liberties taken from time to time on Voyager, the issue is fairly limited. We have very very few instances where holograms have demonstrated sentience and where they have, that sentience has been (eventually) very consciously nurtured and respected. To decide that all holograms require the same level of attention that the Doctor does, for example, makes his story a lot less interesting because it makes him less unique. Is it possible that the Federation is unintentionally creating a subclass of slaves that they are heartlessly and shamelessly exploiting? Maybe. But given what we know of the Federation, I have to believe that were there overwhelming evidence that this were the case, appropriate measures would be taken. We just don't enslave sentient beings. I know we've covered this ground in multiple alien encounters. The minute such a thing is even suspected, the story comes to a screeching halt until everyone figures out how to reorganize the universe to make sure said beings will be treated fairly going foward.
Glad the book worked on balance for those who have posted about their reservations here. Hope this clears up any questions on these specific issues.
Best,
Kirsten Beyer
So...yeah.
I've already explained and thanks to Christopher for finding and posting my quote from a few years ago...my thoughts on the character choices I was faced with in Full Circle. But just so you're getting it from the horse's mouth so to speak...
It's really never a question of my personal feelings about these things the way it would be for someone who doesn't have to do this job. Here's the sad truth...I am now constitutionally incapable of reading anyone else's Trek work and just enjoying it the way I used to when I was just a fan of the stories. Much in the same way it became difficult for me to enjoy a lot of television or movies or plays once I had begun a thorough study of and done lots of work as an actor. It's an occupational hazzard. Once you begin to do these things yourself, your brain does something weird when you are reading or watching. You're not just suspending your disbelief and going along for the ride. You're seeing choices consciously made by the writers or actors and asking yourself if you would have made the same choice, especially if you don't find the choice really compelling. You see the structure. You see when stuff is moving organically and when it's being forced along out of necessity. You can't help it. It's like once you know how a magician does a trick, the trick can't amaze you anymore. You might respect it as a good trick, but you can't experience it the way you did before you knew how it was done.
Yes, every once in a great while a book or a movie or a tv show gets past my weird brain the first time I see it and sucks me in. That's when I know I'm in the middle of something fantastic and I usually just fasten my seatbelt and go with it. Then, after the first time, I usually go back at it a few times and let myself try to see the nuts and bolts so that I can learn from it. But most of the time, I'm trying to figure out how it works, why it works, why it doesn't, and if there's anything there I need to file away for later use. It's also probably why most of the time when I'm reading for pure pleasure these days, I'm reading non-fiction.
So, to ask if I like these characters or Golden's work is something I can never answer for you now because I never really got to think about them in those terms. In my brain, they were always part of the work I was doing and were therefore catalogued as what I could or would need to use and what I wouldn't.
Looking back now, I think most of what those of you who feel these character resolutions were needlessly or callously rushed are sensing has less to do with those characters specifically and more to do with the scope of the undertaking. Some of them might have had more time had Full Circle been the two novels I had originally intended rather than one. You're talking about 70,000 words...which in some cases is a full Trek novel (though not so much anymore)...worth of material that had to go. And you should also bear in mind that we also had Janeway, her death, Chakotay, Tom, B'Elanna, Harry, Tuvok, the Doctor, Seven and a handful of critical to the ongoing story new characters like Eden, Batiste and Cambridge who required lots of attention. That right there is more than enough for a book the size of Full Circle to track. Then we're also covering almost three years of time which only makes it harder to spend time anywhere but with these main characters.
Once I knew how we were moving forward, I put my focus there. More time might have been spent with the others had this project come together differently, but even I can't tell you now how exactly that would have worked or if you would have felt their deaths or departures less harsh.
And finally, I'll say this about poor Akolo Tare. Christie did deal with the rape issue. She showed it happening and gave us a taste of its initial aftermath. Tare didn't die until almost two years later in real universe time but you should assume that as she was still doing her job, and quite well in the scenes we saw her in before she died, that she found some way of dealing with her personal tragedy in a healthy way. Perhaps it would have been interesting to take the time and show exactly how that happened for her but the plate was already pretty full initially with Tom and B'Elanna's story, and the immediate aftermath of Janeway's death.
Is something like this an issue Trek should tackle? Why not? I prefer to come at these things a little more obliquely, however. In some ways I think the issues Seven was dealing with both in the manner of Janeway's death and her transformation by the Caeliar covers some of the same ground, though perhaps in a less direct way.
And finally, as it related to ths holographic rights issue, I was explicily asked by my editor to allow that particular thread to trail off as he felt, and I actually agree, that despite the liberties taken from time to time on Voyager, the issue is fairly limited. We have very very few instances where holograms have demonstrated sentience and where they have, that sentience has been (eventually) very consciously nurtured and respected. To decide that all holograms require the same level of attention that the Doctor does, for example, makes his story a lot less interesting because it makes him less unique. Is it possible that the Federation is unintentionally creating a subclass of slaves that they are heartlessly and shamelessly exploiting? Maybe. But given what we know of the Federation, I have to believe that were there overwhelming evidence that this were the case, appropriate measures would be taken. We just don't enslave sentient beings. I know we've covered this ground in multiple alien encounters. The minute such a thing is even suspected, the story comes to a screeching halt until everyone figures out how to reorganize the universe to make sure said beings will be treated fairly going foward.
Glad the book worked on balance for those who have posted about their reservations here. Hope this clears up any questions on these specific issues.
Best,
Kirsten Beyer
Thanks, Ms. Beyer, for your very comprehensive answer, especially regarding Akolo Tare. Just so you know, it was only a very minor criticism of mine, as I did thoroughly enjoy Full Circle (and am now doing the same with Unworthy!), and I fully understand how in this case, the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few, or the one.
I know that the back-and-forth between Christopher and Relayer has focused on my initial point about the killing off of characters, but my general feeling about the book - as it stands along with the other novels set immediately post-Destiny - was that it provided an "emotional center" for the events of the trilogy, which set it apart from the other novels. "Losing the Peace" and "A Singular Destiny" were more focused on the political and social effects of the Borg invasion; although we did have Jasminder's story of coming to terms with the death of her family, the fact that she was at the time a relatively new character meant that we hadn't had much time to get to know her before the event. With the main Voyager cast, whom we've gotten to know fairly intimately over the last seventeen years (!), the emotional impact is much greater, as the reader is able - for example - to look back with B'Elanna as she remembers Janeway in her daily rituals, and feel the loss almost as much.
I know that the back-and-forth between Christopher and Relayer has focused on my initial point about the killing off of characters, but my general feeling about the book - as it stands along with the other novels set immediately post-Destiny - was that it provided an "emotional center" for the events of the trilogy, which set it apart from the other novels. "Losing the Peace" and "A Singular Destiny" were more focused on the political and social effects of the Borg invasion; although we did have Jasminder's story of coming to terms with the death of her family, the fact that she was at the time a relatively new character meant that we hadn't had much time to get to know her before the event. With the main Voyager cast, whom we've gotten to know fairly intimately over the last seventeen years (!), the emotional impact is much greater, as the reader is able - for example - to look back with B'Elanna as she remembers Janeway in her daily rituals, and feel the loss almost as much.
As someone who wasn't able to acquire copies of the Spirit Walk duology, Full Circle came directly on the heels of The Farther Shore, so I consequently didn't have a whole lot of attachment to the new characters who ended up dying during the course of the novel, although I do remember wondering at the time why those characters were killed off, especially Kaz, so it's interesting to hear details about why certain decisions were made.
Regarding the whole 'Holographic rights' issue, I never got the feeling in reading Full Circle that it was abandoned, especially in light of things that happen in Unworthy.
Regarding the whole 'Holographic rights' issue, I never got the feeling in reading Full Circle that it was abandoned, especially in light of things that happen in Unworthy.
Right. It's like how, when I watch mystery/procedural shows these days, if I figure out who the killer is, it's usually more from reading the underlying story structure than figuring out in-story clues or motivations. (Although that's something a lot of experienced TV viewers can do, for instance, figuring out that X is the killer because he's the only remaining guest star that hasn't been eliminated yet.)
And there are often BBS threads where I complain about something that happened in a story, for instance the characters doing something that I found morally questionable, and other posters respond, "Well, the characters had to do that because circumstances X, Y, and Z left them no choice." And I'm always a bit surprised that they're just taking it at face value like that, because I'm keenly aware that the writers chose to create those circumstances and I'm thinking about how they could've structured the story differently. They're evaluating it from the perspective of the characters' choices, but I'm evaluating it from the perspective of the creators' choices.
I still read fiction for pleasure, but I tend to read it just as much as a learning experience, hoping to pick up good ideas and inspirations, or to see how other writers handle characterization and plotting and such. I guess that since childhood I've always been good at looking at fiction on two levels at once. Ever since I read The Making of Star Trek in grade school, I've been fascinated by behind-the-scenes stuff, so I developed the knack to approach fiction on two levels at once, both buying into its reality and being aware of the artifice behind its creation. Although a lot of the time, it's the latter part that holds more entertainment value for me.
Yeah. I think what tends to be overlooked about that thread in Golden's novels is that the guy pushing the holographic-rights issue was kind of a nut job, and thus a classic case of an unreliable narrator. Just because he thought that all holograms were sentient beings on the same level as the Doctor and Moriarty, that doesn't mean it was actually true. Although I'll grant that Ms. Golden maybe could've stood to make that a little clearer in the text.
I really liked Kaz, but do agree that Trill culture has been pretty well mined in DS9 lit, and that that is the appropriate place for further exploration of it. And the fact that characters that were liked or had unresolved threads were killed in the the Borg attack makes the events of Destiny that much more real for the reader. Sometimes life doesn't give you the resolution to all of your plotlines.
As for Lyssa Campbell, my attatchment to her was mostly through her function as the "connective thread" from the pre and post-series lit. In fact, I considered Lyssa to be Christie Golden's "signature character", and if others felt the same, I could see how they might wrongly interpret her death as a shot at Golden's work.
Now the Golden character that I really wanted to see die a screaming death, Councilor Astall, whom I once called "the Jar-Jar Binks of Trek lit", had the good sense to jump ship before the Borg hit.
Kirsten, I have always wondered if Astall was handed a "Get out of death free card" by you and Marco just because of the small-minded and demented posters such as myself who would have enjoyed it far too much.
As for Lyssa Campbell, my attatchment to her was mostly through her function as the "connective thread" from the pre and post-series lit. In fact, I considered Lyssa to be Christie Golden's "signature character", and if others felt the same, I could see how they might wrongly interpret her death as a shot at Golden's work.
Now the Golden character that I really wanted to see die a screaming death, Councilor Astall, whom I once called "the Jar-Jar Binks of Trek lit", had the good sense to jump ship before the Borg hit.
Kirsten, I have always wondered if Astall was handed a "Get out of death free card" by you and Marco just because of the small-minded and demented posters such as myself who would have enjoyed it far too much.
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I loved Counselor Astall! I found her to be both incredibly endearing with her mannerisms, and fairly grounded and down-to-earth with her methods in counselling Kaz. But then I've always been a sucker for quirky, atypical personalities - for example, I like T'Ryssa Chen, another "quirky" character who seems to get a lot of hate. I'm grateful to Ms. Beyer for not killing Astall outright (though, if I understand her reasoning, it was more to do with needing to introduce Hugh Cambridge fairly early in the narrative than any personal feelings towards Astall as a character), as it gives her an opportunity to return at a later date.
Very true. That painful screaming death might still be in her future. Makes my heart smile to think of it.
That's something that seems to be tricky for a lot of readers, realizing that when you're discussing the morals of something in a work of fiction, including the fact that the writer included the circumstances that made something necessary.
Also, it's off topic, but I do have to say; I have never understood how people can be less amazed at a magic trick when they know how it works. Personally I can't stand not knowing, and I appreciate a good trick, or a good anything at all really, far, far more when I know how it works. (And I don't perform magic at all, it's just a quirk of how I think) :P
I've never understood writers saying 'oh, I had to do that, the characters made me' or 'oh that character got away from me' or making comments about it 'took them in unexpected directions'.
I've never had that happen in a story. I know going in what happens, when and how and the story and characters are not living breathing entities. they don't escape my control.
Am I doing something wrong or are the other writers who come out with this stuff?
I think I know what the authors are talking about when it comes to characters getting away from you. I'm working on an outline for a universe I came up with, and as I developed things, I realized that I wanted to explore a certain aspect of the universe more, but the best way to do that would be getting rid of one of the characters who was going to be the second lead character. I did go ahead and kill that character, and introduced a new character who I've ended up becoming much more attached to and who allows me to explore things in the universe the other character wouldn't have. So as much as I hated to kill to the character it actually ended up working out better for both character development and world building.
If I understand most authors correctly, they're being somewhat metaphorical. It's not that they're physically incapable of writing the characters as doing something else, but rather that they recognize that if they are going to write the characters in a manner that is consistent with prior characterizations, then they can only write the characters as doing X because doing Y would be inconsistent.
You're definitely doing something wrong. If you want to create characters that your audience can believe in as real, individual people making their own choices, then you have to believe in them too. If you think of them merely as puppets to bend to your will, then that's how they'll come off on the page, as nothing more than mouthpieces for the author.
Good character writing is like method acting -- you don't assemble the performance from outside, but you take the time to create a distinct, well-formed, consistent character and then let yourself discover what that character would say or do in a given situation. All our characters come from inside us, but they're made from different pieces of ourselves, and they can often think or act in ways we never would. And that's exactly what they should do in order to be convincing as characters. So you should put them in the situation and let them react the way they naturally would, instead of pushing them to say and do what you want regardless of whether it's in character.
But at best, it becomes so intuitive that it really does feel like the characters take on lives of their own, and they really can surprise you with some of the things they say or do. The best part of writing is when things spontaneously happen on the page that you never planned on in advance, but that make your story better than it otherwise would've been. If you surprise yourself with the things you discover along the way, then you can do the same for your audience.
Also, keep in mind Star Trek is a shared universe. That likely multiplies the effects Christopher just described as authors frequently get to write characters they didn't originally invent themselves, making the process of discovery as those characters must react to events around them potentially even more surprising at times.
I'm not sure about that, since as viewers we've already seen those characters in a wide range of situations, so we know how they would react to any number of things. With an original character, you may have a pretty good idea of what makes them tick, but may not have specifically put that together with a particular situation or stimulus, and it's not until you do so that you discover how they'd react to it, because you never had the opportunity to consider it before.
To make a scientific analogy, an understanding of a character is basically a theory. A theory, in the scientific sense, is a systematic model that you can use to predict outcomes. Once you've come up with a theory explaining the underlying rules beneath the facts you have (like, say, how an apple falls from a tree or the Moon circles the Earth), you can apply those same rules to new situations (like stars orbiting the galactic core) and predict what the results would be. And by doing that, you can make surprising discoveries that you had no idea were implicit in your theory, because you'd never applied it to that situation before (like, say, the discovery that the stars were orbiting the galactic center at the wrong speed for the observed amount of mass, meaning that the galaxy must be made of 90% dark matter).
Although with shared-universe characters, the surprises can come when other authors see things in a character that you never thought of. For instance, I thought I knew T'Ryssa Chen pretty well, since I created her more than a decade before I brought her into the Trek Lit continuity, so when I read Bill Leisner's manuscript for Losing the Peace and saw he'd given her a deep-seated rage toward her long-lost father, that didn't seem right to me, because as I'd seen the character, it was her mother that she resented while her father was an abstraction she barely thought about. But Bill convinced me that what I'd established about her character in Greater Than the Sum implied some pretty deep daddy issues that I'd never even noticed.
Now that I look at your post again, I realize that's pretty much the opposite of what you were suggesting, because it wasn't me being surprised when I wrote a character someone else created, but me being surprised when someone else found something new in a character I created.
To explain where I was coming from originally, it has been my own experience that writing a pre-established character brings with it less deep-rooted certainty about their modus operandi, and thus requires a more active effort of soul-searching plus research and review to figure out how they would they would react in a given situation.
Let me be clear though, I don't mean to compare my experience to yours: I'm obviously far from a professional writer. But I've been writing Trek prose for about a decade now, in the form of an email-based role-playing game that started out as "everybody writes just a single character" and eventually evolved into more of a collaborative neverending novel-writing effort as player turnover ceased, causing the group to become more tightly knit and dare to develop greater literary ambitions.
I find that when I'm writing a character I invented myself, where I have spent a great deal of time mulling them over in my head and imagining their life, the specifics of their reactions come to me easily, as does the feeling of having the license to implement them. They still can be very surprising in how they differ from my own take on things, but there is no uncertainty about their feelings on the matter. This holds mostly true even as other authors flesh out the character in ways that force me to revise my internal narrative of them (which I eventually came to recognize as a big part of the lasting allure of the game).
However, when writing a character originally contributed by others, I feel on far less secure footing and a greater obligation to stay true to other authors' imaginations as authoritative, taking me on a leg of the journey of discovery I don't tend to experience with "my" characters, involving much re-reading and fact-checking. This can lead to great surprise when I revisit previous events in light of current developments, pick up on hints and nuances I previously glossed over or that seemed less important at the time, and am forced to realize I didn't know the character nearly as well as I thought I did.
In other words, for me the difference tends to be that my own characters are permanently embedded into my working set and I feel more comfortable with making statements about them, whereas with characters invented by others figuring out their reactions is a higher mountain to climb, often adding to the feeling of surprise at the outcome of a situation.
OTOH, occassionally things do also play out in reverse, since speculating about the behavior of a "foreign" character is less intimate in the sense of removing the this-came-out-of-me factor. I've sometimes been appalled and bewildered at the outlook on life characters I've created chose to adopt.
Let me be clear though, I don't mean to compare my experience to yours: I'm obviously far from a professional writer. But I've been writing Trek prose for about a decade now, in the form of an email-based role-playing game that started out as "everybody writes just a single character" and eventually evolved into more of a collaborative neverending novel-writing effort as player turnover ceased, causing the group to become more tightly knit and dare to develop greater literary ambitions.
I find that when I'm writing a character I invented myself, where I have spent a great deal of time mulling them over in my head and imagining their life, the specifics of their reactions come to me easily, as does the feeling of having the license to implement them. They still can be very surprising in how they differ from my own take on things, but there is no uncertainty about their feelings on the matter. This holds mostly true even as other authors flesh out the character in ways that force me to revise my internal narrative of them (which I eventually came to recognize as a big part of the lasting allure of the game).
However, when writing a character originally contributed by others, I feel on far less secure footing and a greater obligation to stay true to other authors' imaginations as authoritative, taking me on a leg of the journey of discovery I don't tend to experience with "my" characters, involving much re-reading and fact-checking. This can lead to great surprise when I revisit previous events in light of current developments, pick up on hints and nuances I previously glossed over or that seemed less important at the time, and am forced to realize I didn't know the character nearly as well as I thought I did.
In other words, for me the difference tends to be that my own characters are permanently embedded into my working set and I feel more comfortable with making statements about them, whereas with characters invented by others figuring out their reactions is a higher mountain to climb, often adding to the feeling of surprise at the outcome of a situation.
OTOH, occassionally things do also play out in reverse, since speculating about the behavior of a "foreign" character is less intimate in the sense of removing the this-came-out-of-me factor. I've sometimes been appalled and bewildered at the outlook on life characters I've created chose to adopt.
^Well, it sounds there like you're talking more about not knowing how a character would react, rather than being surprised by how they do react. The kind of surprise that I'm talking about, and that I think writers in general tend to talk about, comes from having a character's patterns of thought and behavior so well-established within you that you can let them run on autopilot and just kind of sit back and watch as they do their own thing, which might include saying or doing something that you didn't plan on having them say or do but that just felt right at that moment.
With what you're saying about writing other people's characters, it sounds like the surprises come more in the research phase as you're trying to get an initial handle on the characters, which then leads to planning of what they'll say or do when you get to writing the scene. It's not so much the kind of discovery in the moment, something just pouring out on the page and making you laugh or gasp in delight, that I'm thinking about.
With what you're saying about writing other people's characters, it sounds like the surprises come more in the research phase as you're trying to get an initial handle on the characters, which then leads to planning of what they'll say or do when you get to writing the scene. It's not so much the kind of discovery in the moment, something just pouring out on the page and making you laugh or gasp in delight, that I'm thinking about.
Actually, I guess the autopilot thing is something I take for granted, because that's in the nature of the original role-playing format, and while the amount of pre-planning we do has increased substantially over the years, it's still done mostly to maintain acceptable pacing and make sure there exists a collective sense of the kind of story being told, rather than to orchestrate a plot to hit certain definitive notes. To make a very silly comparison, it's probably a bit more like the editors and authors coordinating on the overall direction of the novel line and consistency between individual installments, but within that framework every author has a certain amount of freedom in the actual implementation, and you can't count on being able to have a character say something three novels down the road - it might no longer be a good idea at that point. (Where the comparison falls flat is that editors of course can and do require hitting certain notes, but there's no such privileged role in the game.)
What this means at the end of the day is that what I assume captcalhoun meant with "They don't escape my control" doesn't come into effect: Since no individual author has control over the beginning, middle and end of a single story, there is much less opportunity to put characters at the service of a plot, and instead the autopilot thing takes over.
That makes me very familiar with that kind of surprise - figuring out what a character is going to do in the moment, acting them as you called it earlier, is in a way more the norm than anything else. That might also explain why the sensation of surprise is actually greater to me when a character I don't know as well and feel less secure about does something I didn't expect them to in my hands.
Of course, that's also what sets us apart from the experience of real writers - we're not required to be any good at structuring things, at balancing those modes of letting things develop in the moment and making sure those moments integrate into something greater. We're lucky and thrilled if things do gel that way almost by accident; you're absolutely required to make it happen.
What this means at the end of the day is that what I assume captcalhoun meant with "They don't escape my control" doesn't come into effect: Since no individual author has control over the beginning, middle and end of a single story, there is much less opportunity to put characters at the service of a plot, and instead the autopilot thing takes over.
That makes me very familiar with that kind of surprise - figuring out what a character is going to do in the moment, acting them as you called it earlier, is in a way more the norm than anything else. That might also explain why the sensation of surprise is actually greater to me when a character I don't know as well and feel less secure about does something I didn't expect them to in my hands.
Of course, that's also what sets us apart from the experience of real writers - we're not required to be any good at structuring things, at balancing those modes of letting things develop in the moment and making sure those moments integrate into something greater. We're lucky and thrilled if things do gel that way almost by accident; you're absolutely required to make it happen.
