Thoughts on Fictional Characters and Free Will

My sister recently sent me a link to this blog post, which contains a link to this blog post, which consists mostly of four questions for writers on how they think about their characters. I've been noodling it, and I figured I'd take a stab at answering them today, in part because somehow it got to be 11:00 p.m. and I still haven't written a blog post today.

So here goes.

1. Do you ever perceive your characters as having any free will? Do you feel like you consciously control everything your characters do, or do you sometimes feel like they control their own actions?

A two-part question! That's cheating. I don't think of my characters as having free will. One reason I think fiction is worth having (because this cannot be done to nearly the same degree in nonfiction) is that it allows you to very clearly lay out the chains of causation that lead people to take the actions they do. There are greater and lesser degrees of that in every story, and how much you show the reader is a creative choice, but in my head, every time a character takes an action, I know why. And that makes it difficult to maintain the illusion that they have any free will. The world is constantly pushing them into things, and even when they choose to buck what other people want them to do, they're still doing that because of who they are, which is a result of their life experiences.

That's not to say that my characters don't surprise me. They often do, if only because when I'm plotting or writing a first draft I often make assumptions about how they'll behave that don't add up when push comes to shove, or I learn/create things about them as I write that alter the way they interact with the world and with other characters.

2. Do you perceive your characters as having more free will (or more of a “mind of their own”) if they are similar to you or dissimilar to you? Does the point of view you are writing in ever affect this?

No and no. But what the question seems to be digging for is "do you ever feel like your characters have more a mind of their own?" and the answer to that is yes. Every once in a while, a character seems to spring forth from the depths of my mind more or less fully formed. Their personality is so strong that I know what they're going to do in any given moment without understanding why or sometimes even knowing more than the most basic facts about their history. And when that happens, they surprise me more often.

3. Do reader/fan reactions ever change your understanding of who a character “really is” (or have you ever discovered something you did not realize was true about one of your characters based on feedback from early readers?)

Yes. Maybe it's a sign that I'm not as tight a writer as I'd like to be, but I imagine this happens to everyone. When I write, I leave space inside the narrative for the reader to inhabit. Every person who reads my books will read them slightly differently. Thinking the way I do about stories (which is that they take place only in the reader's mind, and that the words on the page are really just code designed to evoke a story in someone's mind), it surprises me more often that anyone ever agrees on who my characters are.

4. If you’ve ever had a movie made from your book, do you think the movie altered your mental image/concept/understanding of the character in any way?

Go ahead. Rub it in. I'll have you know that Peter Jackson has been alerted to my book, so it's only a matter of time before he turns it into a trilogy.

Hope that's some interesting food for thought! And happy May.

News for the Week of 5.16.13: Kickstarter Survey, Homebuying, Soulwoven: Exile, and Nadya Revisions

Dear Friends and Readers,

It’s survey time! I’m building the skeleton of the Kickstarter for Soulwoven, and I want your help! I’ll talk more about it below, but for now, link here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XR6QC6G

Here’s the deal with the survey. Kickstarter lets people like me fund projects they don’t have the scratch to pay for themselves, like buying professional services for long books. It also lets people like you support the creation of art by pledging money to a project. In return, you get special, one-of-a-kind rewards. The survey is going to help me figure out what to offer as those rewards. I’m choosing to publish Soulwoven this way because I want to make you guys as big a part of the process as possible. And I want to make sure that there are backer rewards in the Kickstarter that you’ll get excited about.

So please drop in and share your opinions. It’s a four-question survey, and well worth your time if you want to help this thing get off the ground and get some awesome stuff in return.

In. Other. News!

My fiancee and I bought a house. The process of that has been taking up a great of deal of time that would have otherwise been spent writing. You have my apologies for that.

But!

I’ve finished a full draft of Soulwoven: Exile, the sequel to Soulwoven. It’s now waiting for me to finish some work revising Nadya so I can get Nadya back to an agent who showed some interest in it. Once I’ve done that, I’m going to take one last look at Exile and start sharing it with my trusty team of early readers. Hopefully it will be on its way to you guys by the end of the summer.

I’m extremely excited about the stories I have coming up for you guys. If you haven’t yet, check out Three Dances and buy a copy via the links on Wattpad or my website. The more books I sell, the more time I get to spend writing.

Cheers and springtime love,

Jeff

Three Dances Launch Party Speechifying, Part Two: Thank You

Just another short clip from the Three Dances launch party speech. A lot of the speech was taken up with thanking people who helped specifically on the book, but I spent a minute or so talking about the ways in which people have helped me generally, sometimes without even realizing it.

And I wanted to share that bit with people who weren't there, because I think sometimes we have a tendency to tell ourselves that people don't want or need our encouragement. And a lot of times that's simply not true.

Enjoy!

News for the Week of 4.2.13: Icy Roads, Encouraging Things, and SOULWOVEN Coming Out Soon!

Greetings Friends and Readers!

Apologies for the late newsletter. I spent the weekend dodging semis on icy roads in the mountains and have only just recovered from the shock (and the Easter meal that followed).

So, to the news:

Work is picking up on Soulwoven: Exile, the sequel to Soulwoven. I’m about a third of the way through it now, and while I’ve hit a few sticky points, and I’m also really starting to get into my groove. It still has to go through a few more rounds of reads and revisions before it will be ready for mass consumption, but I hope to have it finished soon.

Nadya has been getting a decent response from the agents I’ve submitted it to. So far it’s still all “no”s, but they’re the “loved this, didn’t love this,” or “thought it was strong but just didn’t connect with it” kind of “no”s. As an editor who writes letters like this, I know how close this means I am, and I take a great deal of comfort in it. I plan to sneak in another round of revision on it based on some agent feedback after I’ve finished this draft of Exile and then send it out to a broader swath of agents this summer.

And speaking of summer, I’ve decided to self-publish Soulwoven in the summer as well! I’m shooting for a June release date, which is a bit ambitious, but hopefully will be manageable. What that means for you is that you’ll be able to get a print copy, or a prettied-up digital copy, or a bundle of both, within the next few months.

Finally, Three Dances has hit the home stretch! I’m waiting on the final proof copy of the printed version, and as long as I don’t find any problems in it, it’ll go live either this week or next.

The fourth story in the collection, Birdcage, is up on Wattpad now. It’s about an ordinary human being who encounters something he can’t explain, and a supernatural being caught in a cycle of death, rebirth, and predation she doesn’t particularly enjoy.

It is also, despite what one early reader said to me, decidedly NOT erotica.

Happy spring, friends! It snowed AND rained here today, so surely the world is yawning and stretching and waking up for another round of rabid growth.

Jeff

The Grand Experiment: Week 14(!)

Holy cow, I can't believe it's been 14 weeks since I started up The Grand Experiment. Results so far:

Book Country: Never got off the ground. Their terms of service smelled rotten to me.

Authonomy: Rank 5,584. Five chapters up. Tabled while I concentrate on Wattpad.

Wattpad: 5,546 reads. 144 votes. 49 comments. 34 chapters up. Ranked #42 in Fantasy and #643 in Teen Fiction. Has been ranked as high as #25 in Fantasy and #15 in Adventure (before I switched its genres). Also, I got an invitation to participate in the site's Writer Partner Program.

So as you can see by the statistics, I've been focusing on Wattpad, in large part because of the promotional opportunity they've extended to me and in large part because it's got the most readers in the audience I want to reach (teenagers and young adults), and also because I just like the community feeling the best.

Also important is that I've accelerated my revision timetable by about 6x in order to get the full manuscript in shape and get it up on Wattpad before it gets promoted. That has severely limited the time I have to do anything that is not either writing or related to paying bills (like keeping up with this blog. Sorry!).

I've been tracking several statistics on Wattpad with the help of a handy spreadsheet, which I will share with you below:

Click on it to make the words and numbers readable sized.

I share it with you because it's an example of a benefit to posting on Wattpad that I absolutely did not expect. I can collect a ton of remarkably granular data on how my book is doing day by day (really, I could track it more often than that, too, and perhaps I should...but that would mean a lot more work and less time for...drumroll...writing). And because I'm collecting all this information, I can track some interesting things. Like, for instance, I can see that my reads are showing exponential growth.

Or I can investigate the relationships between my genre rankings and how many new reads I get every day.

(There's a bad data point on 9/4 that screws that graph up a bit, but I still think it's interesting).

Or I can look at any number of other things. When I change covers or cover copy, I can see if it has a statistically significant effect on my reads. I can see the same for my ranks or my posting patterns. And once I've finished writing the book itself (which is still the most important thing, no matter how many bells and whistles and numbers I put into orbit around it), I'll be able to take a look at all these numbers and see if I can't figure out how to goose them.

And at the very least, that's a new, fun kind of problem to play with.

Speaking of cover changes, I'm playing around with an idea for a new cover for Soulwoven, and I'd love to get some opinions on it. It adds the subtitle of volume one (I am, after all, writing one story in four parts) and a tagline, which I rather like. I've almost made it live on Wattpad several times, but after the horrible, fall-on-its-face failure of cover variant #2 during my last vote-a-thon, I think it wise to consult my readers before doing so.

Said cover to follow. Let me know what you think. I hope to have Soulwoven up on Wattpad in its entirety by the end of the month, at which point I will become a more active blogger once more and begin playing around with all kinds of markety type ideas which should make for interesting blog posts. Thanks for bearing with me, and if you're jonesing to hear from me, I'd suggest you follow me on Facebook, or Twitter, or Wattpad, because it's easier to post tiny things on those sites than sit down and compose blog posts for me right now.

And in the meantime, go read the book! It's more than halfway up, and it won't be online for free forever :-).

New cover here:

Cultural Learnings from Agent Meetings for Make Benefit of My Books

Yesterday, I met with two agents at the Lighthouse Writer's Workshop's Litfest 2012 in Denver. The meetings were a part of their business weekend pass, which at $220 was a steal (I also get to hit up seminars on marketing, freelancing, the small press/magazine market, and other things I could stand to learn more about).

Anyway, I was reminded of a very interesting thing right off the bat:

There are several different subcategories of fantasy reader, and agents fall into them too.

I met with two agents, both of whom rep fantasy. One of the great things about the meetings (and the reason I signed up for the conference, actually), was that they were 15 minutes long and included a critique of the first 15 pages of a manuscript (For reference, a similar critique I recently donated to the Brenda Novak diabetes auction went for $81). My two agents gave me very different feedback. One of them wanted more worldbuilding in the opening pages. The other told me she just hadn't connected with the characters.

I took good things away from both meetings, but they were also a reminder that some people read fantasy for the world-as-a-character, while others are more interested in the characters themselves. As a writer, I gravitate a little more towards the second group, and it's there that I think I should be concentrating my efforts.

Last night, I revamped Chapter 1 of Soulwoven. I do not know whether the changes will stick. I am very confident that they make the book more marketable, and fairly confident that they make the opening more interesting.

But they also place focus on elements of the story I had not intended to focus upon. How far the ripple effect of that will reach, I'm not yet sure.

...and now it's time to shower, eat, and hop in the car to go find more cultural learnings for make benefit of my books.

Writing Wednesday: Writers, Readers, and Editors

I was originally going to write something about manuscripts again this week, and going back over them to in print versus on the screen, but I think I'll save that for another time. I went to a critique group last night, and as I was falling asleep after getting home I had a bit of an epiphany. Anyone who has had their work critiqued by more than one person will tell you that you can get vastly different feedback about the same piece by different people. Part of learning to write is learning what to do with the feedback you receive.

I'm big on feedback. I like to get as much of it as possible, and as a result I like to have all kinds of different people go over my work. And I think that I can put all of them into the broad, venn-diagramy circles of reader, editor, or writer.

This is useful because each type of person tends to give a specific kind of feedback, and knowing what to expect from a person helps you figure out to whom you should give your work depending on what you need.

Writers, I have found, tend to try to guide you towards one particular style of writing. They are people who have spent a greater-than-average amount of time thinking about writing. They will often describe it as a "craft" and have probably read at least one how-to-write book. They have found a number of things that work for them and tend to press you to adopt those same ideas. They may occasionally treat stylistic rules (active verbs are better than passive verbs) with more reverence than grammatical rules (you cannot join two independent clauses with a comma). Some of them take great joy in formulas and jargon.

Editors try to guide you towards the style they think you're shooting for or that best suits a work. They can see both sides of most stylistic issues, and their job is not to tell you which is best but to help you optimize your prose for whatever you're going for. They know the formulas and the jargon, but they have also seen their limitations and tend to be ambivalent about them. They read more amateur writing than any other group of people in the world and as such are particularly averse to certain things that are common in said writing.

Readers just read. They have never picked up a how-to-write book. They may have read a few stories for their brother or sister or friend who wanted feedback, but on the whole most writing they encounter has already been published. Some of them read a lot. Some of them read a little. They are a very diverse group of people, but they will tend to tell you things like, "This doesn't make sense," "I thought this character was a dick," or "I had no idea what was happening when the fish-monster and the shapeshifting wolphin were fighting the giant octopus on Mars." They will point out problems. They will usually refrain from trying to solve them for you.

Editors and writers often overlap. Some writers are excellent editors. Some editors fixate on one style like writers do. Regardless, there are useful things to be had from all three. Writers can help shake you out of your own dogmatic ideas about writing. At the very least, they expose you to different ways of thinking about putting words together, and every once in a while something will click and you'll get something you can use from them. Editors are extremely useful, but will probably have little time for you if your mechanics aren't sound to begin with, because they get tired of saying the same things over and over again. Readers are perhaps the most useful of all, except when you have a problem that you don't know how to solve.

In other news, its dashed cold outside and the holidays are over. I am almost finished with my final edits on Soulwoven, and it should be out the door next week. How's that for meeting a New Year's resolution?