Official Writer Philosophy of Character Death

(Note: this post will be packed full of Divergent and Insurgent and surprisingly, Harry Potter, spoilers, so don't read it if you don't want to be spoiled!)

(Also, there is no reason to infer anything about book 3 from this post. Just responding to a bunch of questions that have popped up in my tumblr ask box recently. To quote Conan O'Brien: keep cool, my babies.)

Many people ask me variations of this question:why did soandso have to die? A couple times I've also been asked: Why don't you just kill minor characters or ones we're not attached to?

Let me address that last one right away: I think it's a good thing that the characters I "kill" are ones we're all attached to, so that those deaths are not gratuitous. Why? Because I don't want the books to be like Grand Theft Auto, where people get killed all the time but no one really cares or thinks about it. (That game can be fun, by the way, but it just wouldn't make a thoughtful book!) Even though I write violent books, I don't want to make people desensitized to violence, ever. That means that when someone dies, I want to feel it, and I want you to, too.

(Whether I have succeeded in that goal, by the way, is up for the readers to decide. But I'm just talking about what I try to do, not what I do perfectly!)

But my real philosophy of character death in the Divergent series is that the world Tris lives in is supposed to be messed up. And there's a war going on. And from all I've ever learned about war, if you're involved in one, people you care about will be killed, and it won't make any sense to you, and it won't be fair, and it will be at all the wrong times, and some people will lose more than other people, and that's just how it is.

It would be far too convenient for Tris to retain all her friends and family while all these other people are losing theirs. Especially since Tris's friends and family choose to directly involve themselves, perhaps more than others, in violent and difficult situations. I try to be just as unfair as the world is; I take away characters when I have to, and I don't really think about whether it's balanced. Tris loses both parents; Tobias and Christina lose neither. Tris gets to keep her boyfriend; Christina's is taken from her. It's not fair either way, and that feels honest to me.

I think I learned this lesson from Harry Potter. Would we would really, truly have believed that Voldemort was a heinous villain if no one Harry loved had died? Would we have believed that his world was being pitched into darkness? Would his sacrifice, in book 7, have felt truly necessary to us? I really don't think so. I was very attached to the characters that died. I remember crying like a baby in my bathroom before school when I read book six. (Big mistake, reading the end of that one before school. Seriously.) But their deaths made Harry's world, and the state it was in, so much more real to me; they made his search for the horcruxes and his defeat of Voldemort feel so much more urgent. Those books wouldn't have been the same without Rowling's willingness to make sacrifices. That, more than anything, made me decide that if I was going to be an author, I had to be willing to make sacrifices too.

As for why certain characters over others, well, I don't know. I think people-- even writers themselves!-- sometimes have the impression that the authors of stories are completely in control of those stories and the characters that inhabit them. That really isn't true for me, though. I know it sounds crazy, but I create the characters and they become real to me and then they do whatever the heck they want. (Especially Peter. Whoa.) And when characters die, it's usually because I hit a point in the story where I don't feel any danger anymore, because no one Tris cares about is in peril, and then someone goes. BAM. Who that is depends on the moment in the story. It's often a shock to me.

In any case, what I'm saying is: I don't have that much control, and I try to follow each character's nature. (IE: the Abnegation will be more likely to die because they have that impulse to throw themselves in front of others. The Dauntless are more likely to die because of unnecessary heroics and recklessness. Etc.) I also try to be real with myself about what kind of world Tris lives in. She is not immune to its corruption or its violence. (And frankly, I think it already requires some suspension of disbelief that she didn't die in Insurgent.) All that I can do is try to have her react to her losses as realistically as possible, which often means that she's unlikable, as grieving and guilt-ridden people sometimes are.

So, that is my Official Writer Philosophy of Character Death.

In other news, will I ever be able to write a blog post without referring to Harry Potter? I'm not sure.

Knowing Character Vs. Knowing About Character

Recently it occurred to me that I might need to simplify things, as far as the writing goes. Writing advice is a good thing to hear, from time to time, because it gives you fresh ways of approaching your work. But ultimately, writing is not quite that methodical, at least not for me. I can't learn how to do it better in the same way that I can learn a language or how to complete a math problem. There isn't a formula. There's what I see and how I talk about it, and a lot of that is inexplicable.

Why do the words come out one way with one story and another way with another story? I have no idea. Why do little pieces of myself work their way into my work without my knowing? I don't know. Do I need to know? Probably not.

Anyway. For me, the first task of this new year is to pare down all the tidbits of advice floating around in my head in the hope of rediscovering The Basics: me, the word document, and the characters.

The other day I listened to a recording of Marilynne Robinson speaking at DePaul University, a talk titled "My Faith and My Fiction." (It's on iTunesU if you want to hear it! It's fascinating.) And I thought "AHA! Here is someone who is talking about writing in a way that is currently helpful to me. Perhaps I should transcribe part of it and put it on the blog!"

(No, this is not, word for word, what I thought. I rarely say AHA to myself. Or "perhaps.")

Anyway, enjoy:

"For me at least writing consists largely of exploring intuition. The character is really the sense of a character, embodied, attired, and given voice as he or she seems to require. Where does this creature come from? From watching, I suppose, from reading emotional significance in gestures and inflections as we all do all the time. These moments of intuitive recognition float free from their particular occasions and recombine themselves into nonexistent people the writer, and if all goes well, the reader, feel they know.

There is a great difference in fiction and in life between knowing someone and knowing about someone. When a writer knows about his character he is writing for plot. When he knows his character he is writing to explore, to feel reality on a set of nerves somehow not quite his own."

And later on...

"It was then that I had the sense of this, that I knew this man. ...I didn't have trouble sustaining the voice because I felt as if I knew him so well. It seemed more as if I simply had to pay attention to him than that I had to do anything else. I liked him; I enjoyed his company. Who knows where he came from?"

Cool, right? The last time I really knew a character was when I sat down to write the first draft of Divergent. Maybe one of the reasons I've been having trouble with the end of D2 is that I've lost touch with her.

Just some thoughts I'm having.

Anyone else have some writing resolutions?

Character Priorities and Story Jet Propulsion

I have been thinking this morning about how stories begin. And I don't mean how they open, because that's a whole different discussion, one typically involving rules like "No 'waking up' openings!" and "No 'first day of school' openings!", rules that strike terror into the hearts of writers everywhere as they frantically revise their first five pages. No, I mean how they begin. Here, check out my chart:



This is an extremely basic map of a story. Generally speaking, most stories match up with this map. A character is living in his or her state of equilibrium-- Harry Potter is in the cabinet under the stairs, Frodo is living in the Shire, Elizabeth Bennett is chilling in the Bennett home, and so on. Then an inciting incident occurs that thrusts the character out of equilibrium-- Harry finds out he's a wizard, Frodo discovers the ring, Elizabeth lays the smackdown on Mr. Darcy-- and into The Story.

I'm really only concerned with the first part at the moment:


Right. So it occurred to me today that this chart/map/thing is misleading. Because it isn't really the incident that propels the story into motion, it's how the character responds to that incident that launches us into the story. I'm thinking that the story begins when a character responds to an incident in an unexpected way.



I say "unexpected" not because you're always surprised by the way that a character responds to The Incident, but because there are two kinds of fictional people: normal, average people, and the kind of people that we write about. (I say "fictional" because I'm not convinced that anyone is really normal or average in real life.) And normal, average people have a certain set of priorities. They go something like this:

1. Survival
2. Good health
3. Safety/Security ($$$, Family, Home, etc.)
4. Status (social, mostly)
5. Sensual stimulation (Look at the pretty colors!)
6. Mental stimulation
7. Altruism
8. Suspended action (or "rest")

(I'm going to credit Dennis Hensley with those, although I'm sure variations of that list are floating around everywhere.)

Want to get nerdy? Because that list of priorities loosely fits into Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a (debatable) psychological theory of human motivation. Yeah, that's right. We're getting FANCY on the blog today.

Basically, normal, average people want to survive more than they want mental stimulation (which is why you would choose food over television, given the choice) and they want safety more than rest (which is why you work for an income), et cetera. But the people that you write about aren't like that. When presented with an Inciting Incident, those people rearrange normal, average priorities. And that's how stories start.

Take The Hunger Games as an example. The story of The Hunger Games starts when Katniss decides to take her sister's place in the Games in order to save her. Basically, she places altruism (Priority #7) above survival (Priority #1). This leaves a tiny corner of my brain asking: what kind of person does that? And: how can she possibly survive this? And I am sucked in. Success!

Harry Potter places mental stimulation above security.
Frodo places altruism above security.
Achilles places status above health/survival.
Bella Swann sticks sensual stimulation above survival. (That's how I see it, anyway.)
Jonas (of The Giver) chooses mental stimulation over safety and status.
Hester Prynne places sensual stimulation above status

And the list goes on.

Thinking about this can be helpful, I think, when you're writing your own stories. I wasn't consciously thinking "what priorities should my character rearrange?" when I wrote DIVERGENT, but when I consider what made Beatrice so interesting to me, I realize that that's what it was. Beatrice has to decide whether to put mental stimulation above security, or to put altruism above mental stimulation. Sort of a complicated decision. And I had to write about it.

Sometimes we writers find it difficult to get the character out of equilibrium, or to figure out what happens after the inciting incident. And if you can ask yourself what your character's priorities are, and figure out what that suggests about how they will behave throughout the rest of the book, you can propel yourself right into the story.

Consider the squid. Squid are my favorite animal for one reason: they move by sucking water into their body cavities and squeezing it back out again. Jet propulsion. It's the coolest thing ever.

Rearranged character priorities are the water to your story's inner squid. If you give them a squeeze, your story will go shooting forward into...the ocean of...ideas. Okay, this comparison totally fell apart. I really just wanted to talk about squid. But you get what I'm saying.

Will Katniss continue to choose altruism over survival, or will her priorities change? And what does that say about her character? Will Harry Potter discover that he values safety a little more than he thought? (The answer to that is, of course: not really.) And what is UP with the girl who has the hots for the guy who wants to freaking murder her? All valid questions. Fascinating questions.

Do your characters re-order their priorities in a weird way? And how? Inquiring minds want to know.