Tom writes "...you have a duty to the reader to let it go, to allow yourself to see things you've never seen before, to feel things you've never felt before and to go places that, to be honest, no one else ever went before."
I know first hand what it is he's talking about. Chase Benton, who first entered my world in a dream sequence that I had the summer and fall of 2011, is one of those characters who, even now that his story is written and in the final stages of preparation before release, whispers to me from the darkness I keep trying to commit him to. When I'm trying to work on something else or have to do the duties that are demanded of me in the real world, I try not to think about him, but when everything else was falling down around me and I needed to leave the real world for a time, I had to let go and allow him to lead me places I've never been before.
Part of how I make my stories come to life, for myself as much as for my faithful readers, is to listen to the characters, then research things to make it easier for me to picture what they're telling me. During the time that I was struggling with another tale that I had decided needed to be done, telling myself that Chase was only 14 at the time and needed to mature a bit more before I could write a tale about him, I did research on some of the things he had already shown me. I looked at photographs of the streets in New Orleans. I studied the streets and where they went. When he insisted that Cody lived in the Bayou, I looked at photographs of the Louisiana Bayou area. Every part of the story that that he showed me that I had no experience in was researched. And when I had more time on my hands than I knew what to do with, I let go and let him control me.
Speaking of him like a living person in Facebook posts has my older sister insisting that I need therapy to get over my "mental issues", but she doesn't understand how cathartic it is to just let a character take me over like that. Chase, and to a lesser degree, Aloriah, have briefly taken over my world, and it feels tremendously invigorating to let them! The only thing I did in the "creation" of this pair came primarily after the rough draft, when I was getting ready for the first edit.
After Chase had talked himself out and allowed me to put "The End" to the story, I went back into research mode. I looked at tornados and what to do if you look up and see one coming toward you - like this one:
I looked at some of the other details about the story and made some minor corrections to the tale. But mostly, I refreshed my memory about all the grammar rules and when through my first edit looking for mistakes.
Your characters and story lines can take you places you've never been before. For brief periods of time, especially for stories that have no real basis in fact, you can suspend reality for a time and just go with the flow, encouraging your readers to do the same when the story takes them. When you do it right, you get a comment like this one from Arline Chase, who reviewed my book and whose full comment appears on the first page once the book goes to print: "Debi Emmons makes it all so real that you look up in surprise to find yourself in your own living room."
I hope the writers out there following this blog can learn to let go. Release yourself from the bonds of the real world and let your characters take you where you need to be in order to write a good story that takes your readers along for the ride. Worry about such things as grammar and truth when your character has let you go and you're getting ready to edit. There's a song I used to sing with the church choir that is going through my head: "Let it be, let it flow, and everywhere you go may the peace of the Lord follow you."
If you let your characters go and let yourself go while writing, peace will indeed follow you.
If you let your characters go and let yourself go while writing, peace will indeed follow you.
i have done nanowrimo (national novel writing month) for the past couple of years, and that really teaches you to let go. sometimes, though, i feel like it's not so much letting my characters take control as letting my inner thesaurus/dictionary spit out every word it knows just to up the word count. i love books with characters that live in my mind after the last page, though, and hope that i can someday write that kind.
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