Other People's Characters and the Voices in Your Head

As those of you that read my blog regularly know by now I write collaborative serial fiction. I got to thinking, recently, that writing with other author's characters is not so different than writing solo. It's certainly not what I would consider the main difference between writing a novel or short story and what I do. One of the most common experiences I have noticed with all fiction writers is that they talk about their characters coming to 'life' and having a voice of their own. Often writers will claim that they cannot force their characters to behave in a certain way - that each character has a will of their own.

This is totally true for me whether I write the character or someone else does. The only difference between my characters and the characters of my co-writers is that I don't hear the voices in my head. I have to have conversations. Since I do all of my collaborative fiction interaction online that comes in the form of e-mails, message-boards, and instant messages so it's damn near to voices in my head or my general writing experience. Just like when I'm creating my own characters it has its ups and downs. I have to work to be fluid enough to accommodate a writer being true to their character's personality, and keep us on plot, as well as not make my character the 'star' all the time. Just like with any successful living character I can find that they can bring something new to the story that I hadn't imagined but is better than before, and since this is collaboration their character has equal billing.

It's the same whether you are writing by yourself, maybe trying to stick to a plot and a synopsis, or whether you are in discussion with another person - sometimes a better idea comes along and you need to be flexible. In the case of a novelist it might be your own inner critic but it could equally be an objective reader, an editor, or an agent. You also have to know when to stick to your guns. Sometimes characters are wrong - what they think is good for them is not good for the overall storyline. It really doesn't matter who the author of that character is at this point.

My biggest problem with characters written by someone other than myself is not them being true to themselves but when they are out of sync with how my characters are. This doesn't usually come up with people I write with regularly, but with newer collaborators. When I first started out on this path and style of writing it used to happen far more regularly particularly because my main character was an historical person Wyatt Earp. People had very set preconceived notions of Wyatt based on their previous knowledge of the character whether from fictional accounts like the movie Tombstone or from skewed historical perspectives. More than once I had to 'buffalo' a few tough skulls to get it through to them that they needed to be reacting to my version of the character, not one previously written and engraved in their head.

That doesn't mean that there can't be a disparity in the way that one character views another. I think that can be very convincingly done in collaborative writing as long as each writer remembers that they might be omniscient but their characters are not. I still write fiction set around Wyatt Earp and I encourage those that write Cowboy characters to view Wyatt as a bully and a pimp, even if Wyatt sees himself as a righteous upright citizen. There is a huge difference in perceiving an event or set of behaviors through your character's spectacles and another between having characters act out of character.

What I think I enjoy the most about working with other author's characters is that they often have backgrounds and sets of experiences that my characters have no inkling of. Much as I might be able to imagine a full pantheon of unique characters with interesting backgrounds they all still share one common denominator: me. Other authors bring in their own unique life situations and that gives them a range of choices that can often be surprising to me. Sometimes it's unpredictable, but after the taste is acquired, collaboration can be a beautiful and inspirational exercise.