What would they do if...

Hey there! Good to see you again. Let me introduce you to a couple of people. This is Dale. He works out at the beef-packing plant as the loading dock supervisor. He's been working at that place for over thirty years, at first to support his mother and sister, and then later his wife and son. He's not quite as content with that fact as he used to be.

And this is Frank, a deputy with the local sheriff's office. Back when he first joined the department, one seriously evil SOB was running it. But he stuck to his guns, even though it cost him his marriage. Now he wants to be sheriff.

Whats going to happen to them? Well, that depends on you and me.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but it's more important that you know your characters during the rewrite than when writing the first draft. On your first trip through the story, you're seeing the big picture, and making sure the ground under your feet is solid. The characters are there to prop up the plot. Whereas you and I (unless the Rutan are reading this) get our structural support from our skeletons, these folks start with what they contribute to our tale. If you took a close look at them the first time they get mentioned, they would probably look like wax statues, not even shaped into good detail on the back. They don't have any life of their own at that point.

On the second pass, they need more life. We're not just appreciating the scenery at that point, we're taking note of how clear the path is, whether the plants look green or brown, and if the area smells like rainforest or store-bought fertilizer. Assuming you're writing something that you want people to read, you better make it a worthwhile investment of their time. If you say the mailman did it on page 483, say it was done with a knife on page 101, and say the mailman faints at the sight of blood on page 257, someone's going to notice. Heck, some people will notice if you misspell one word out of a hundred thousand. People are like that. (See an older entry about writing or filming crap)

What will they do if you get it wrong? Depends. If you're Stephen King, and you put an electric chair in a novel set a few years before they were actually used, every amateur critic and rabid fan in the civilized world will take to the internet and froth at the mouth over it, and it won't affect your sales one bit. If, on the other hand, you're an unknown, and you write 'cleaver' when you mean 'clever,' or worse, you miss-type it and your autocorrect changes it to the former, the editor may well throw your story in the trash, and you'll only get a form letter with 'not what we're looking for at this time' pre-printed on it.

So think about those characters. Wait until you have the story set in your head and the frame of it on paper first, but try this thought in particular: What would they do if you didn't use them as cannon-fodder? If the martians didn't land, or the dead stayed content and quiet in their graves, or that little piece of a deadly crystal didn't show up at just the right time, what would those people do on what would otherwise be the opening day of your story? As far as the two men you met a few paragraphs ago, Dale would get a little more bitter, just as he did yesterday, and the day before that. His birthday's coming up, you see, and he hasn't lived quite as much as he expected he would have at his age. What about Frank? Well, I told you he wants to be sheriff. I might have glossed over the fact that he's already run once, and that he actually held the office for a short while under less than ideal circumstances. He already has a firm picture in his head about how the people in town feel about him, and he tends to ignore anything that contradicts that image. Frank won't be disillusioned any time in the immediate future. He'll just go about his business, being wrong about some very fundamental facts.

But of course, we know what's really going to happen. We've known all along. But also knowing what they might do if they existed without us lets us plot their actions a little more consistently, and it makes them a little more sympathetic to us, which helps us make them more sympathetic to everyone else.

Speaking of which, could I ask for a bit of sympathy? I went through all that chest-puffing last week about how The Red Man Burning was going to be my next book, but between then and now I pulled up that other one I mentioned, In The Dark, and used the word count function. It pulls up at around 43,000 words. At that length I might as well fatten it up and serve it with some flourish. Dress warmly if you read it. It's a bit cold out there in the dark.

Still writing.