Today’s pet peeve: people who think that just because they’re the writer, they can make their characters do whatever they want.

I know that a lot of people start writing because they have a God complex.  There’s no other way to explain how people create plots that their characters are completely unmotivated to push forwards.

Here’s the thing about characters: You don’t have the power to push them around.  You’re not God, you can’t suddenly transmute water into wine, and you can’t insert thoughts into their heads.  You have two things that you can affect in order to get them to act in a particular way – what happened to them in the past, and what is happening to them in the present.

That’s it.  You control the situation.  Once you’ve defined their temperament – how they normally react to situations – you can only make them react in that way.  If they always think about their child first in the event of an emergency, you can’t suddenly have them forget or ignore their child to help someone else.

If you want to push them into helping someone else, you might have someone comment negatively on the fact that they don’t feel the need to help anyone else once their child is safe.  Put in the situation of their child’s safety having been ensured, the character might then later attempt to help someone else.  But the child has to be safe first.  Because you’ve defined the way they react.  You can challenge their limits, but you can’t ignore them. 

That’s the entire point of creating “rules” in your character’s world.

“But why do I need rules?” you ask.  Because rules are the number one way we make sense out of this world.  We observe what usually happens, and ask “why is that the exception?”  If your character were to abandon her child’s safety completely, you’d better have a pretty goddamn compelling reason why – and even then, it ought to be something they had to think about, something they learned in the course of the story.

“You’re just the Man, trying to keep me down,” you say.  “True rebels don’t pay any attention to the rules!”

I’m glad you mentioned that.  There are always rules.  Even when it doesn’t look like there are rules, there are rules.  There’s a certain kind of writing with that reputation.  Let’s use it as an example.  Beat writing.  Famous writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassidy. 

Beat writing was all about immediacy.  It broke with the need for rhyme or meter or complete thoughts or grammatical rules.  But it had rules of its own.  Jack Kerouac wrote them down.  There was to be, for example, no self-editing.  Everything was to be written down at once, in the moment of passion.  That’s a rule.  It may be arbitrary, but it helps us make sense of what the Beats were doing, and why their work looks the way it does.

The audience similarly needs you to define the characters and let them react consistently.  Otherwise, we never get to ask “Why is he doing that?” because there’s no broken consistency to make it worth asking.