Losing Characters
Cross-posted from The Midnight Hour
I spent the morning reading Orson Scott Card’s essay on Severus Snape. No, really, I did. Besides the fact that I agree with him about Dumbledore, Harry, and Snape, I also have never forgotten Ender’s Game, and I wanted to hear what a master of the literary double-cross thought of Snape.
In the process, Card makes a number of distinctions between the artistic logic we use to plot out the arc of the book, and the genius logic that results in following without question where the Muse wants to lead us, working out our unconscious beliefs–those things we believe so deeply we do not, cannot question them.
It’s well worth reading, and I pasted the entire thing in Notepad to read when I’m feeling blue. Because sometimes I do feel awful in that I have no idea, mostly, how a book is going to end before I get there. I find out just as much as the Reader does. Sometimes I know basically what’s going to happen, but that knowledge is like calling Lord of the Rings a travel story–it doesn’t begin to express the complexity.
Part of that process is gaining an emotional attachment to your characters, not just as cardboard icons that you move around a board, but as people in their own right. Which brings me in a roundabout way to the subject of the day.
I just realized this morning that I am in mourning for Dante Valentine. I’ve spent years working on the books, and the fifth one is finished and past copyediting. I have been in her head for years now, as well as in the heads of her friends and lovers and enemies to varying degrees. I have suffered and celebrated with her, fallen in love and felt aching heartsick bitterness with her, and been there in the dark as she struggles to get up just one more time and fight the good fight. There is a great deal about Dante that I like, and even more that drives me up the wall, and she is dead.
No, I don’t mean dead-dead in the books. I wouldn’t do that to you. That would be like…killing Dumbledore. (Heh. Sorry, couldn’t resist.) I mean that her story has reached the end of its arc; it has finished, and I am no longer her amanuensis. I have been freed from the tyranny of having to get her story out of my head so I could think.
And I am grieving.
I didn’t expect this to happen. In fact, I wanted to throw a goddamn party to celebrate being free of the woman. She’s not very likeable when she’s on a rampage, she’s harsh and bitter and cruel sometimes. She’s got a hair-trigger temper and serious abandonment issues, not to mention a superiority complex and a tendency to believe the worst of her lovers and friends.
But to balance that out, she’s loyal unto death. She tries to be a good person, and holds herself to a standard with no compromises. She thinks about doing the right thing, and if you’re her friend, there’s nothing she won’t do to pull your fat out of the fire. She is both the best and the worst of her kind.
And I kind of, sort of, miss her. I suppose you’d miss anyone you’d spent that much time with.
So here’s my writerly thought for the week: it’s okay to miss your characters, and to give yourself some time to grieve over them. it is better to have written and lost, than never to have written at all.
Or something like that. Maybe I should have a wake.
Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s this new character I’m playing with. Her name is Jill Kismet. She’s a real live firecracker, and I’ve been with her for a while, so I’m sure she’s not a rebound. (We’ve been friends first. *snerk*) Let’s hope she doesn’t go away anytime soon.
My heart can’t stand this kind of breakage.
