Mutiny! (A Meditation on Characters)

This piece was featured on The Writing Show podcast over the summer. Please visit www.writingshow.com, or subscribe directly through iTunes. You can hear my reading of this piece toward the end of the episode titled “Writing Fiction Organically,” which aired on 7/29/07.

Some of you know that I’m a blossoming writer. That is to say, I started out writing super-cheese poetry back in junior high, and then during my college years, (which extended into my late twenties) I evolved to a higher class of internal rhyme schemes, alliterations, and topics above and beyond broken-hearted pubescent crushes through the excellent tutelage I received as a creative writing major at the University. Poetry was my schtick, and writing fiction didn’t seem to come naturally to me although I had a persistent feeling that I was destined to write a novel one day.

At some point in my early thirties, which was really like, yesterday, while working in offices amidst rows of gray walled cubicles, surrounded by people whose dreams were founded upon white picket fences and promotions to middle management, I decided that I’d better get busy writing that book. I needed a real career, one that ran thick with creativity, peppered with adventure, and breathed in a world that could only be called fantasy.

I set out to accomplish this task in all confidence. With my long history as an avid reader, my degree in creative writing, and years of poetic explorations of language under my belt, I felt certain I could crank out a novel in a year or less.

Boy, was I mistaken. My first venture was a novel about a group of friends, who well into their thirties, still attend a yearly “girl trip.” This tale of female bonding over three day long annual slumber parties fueled by tequila shots, vodka crans, and several cases of Pacifico and Corona left me feeling dry. Living it was one thing, and since I’d already lived it, I found I really didn’t want to write about it.

I thought hard about my goals as a writer, and wondered at how I could have been so absent-minded. Sure, I like a little chick lit every now and again but what I really love to chew on is some hardy sci-fi fantasy. Give me flying dragons, worlds dominated by E.S.P. (aka laran), children who can travel through their sibling’s veins and arteries, talking barnyard animals, little boys who are surprised to learn that they are in fact, wizards, and oh yes, do please, give me superheroes.

I crafted a couple of characters, gave them certain “special abilities,” and set them against a background world fraught with corporate travesty, political upheavals, and highly evolved technology.

But then one of my characters decided to go off on some other adventure. He wanted to explore the Mayan ruins, and find there an ancient codex, which holds the key to a great unknown - wait, that’s way too much research for a first novel, I said to him. The Mayans? Do you know how many books I’d have to read? A little research is fine for a first novel, but let’s not get carried away.

The character heeded my plea and returned to the world from whence he came but he didn’t stay there long. Next thing I know, he’s running off to join some underground organization that studies psi abilities and is at war with another underground organization that works to manifest psi abilities and I said, wait, this isn’t Heroes, why are you doing this to me?
I turned to his daughter, and begged her to move the story along but the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. She wanted to save the world, one animal at a time. She started to hear the thoughts of abandoned pets in the shelter where she works and begged for her own self-starring series.

So instead of a tightly-written, highly engaging, fantastical and complete first novel, I am buried in notes, outlines, character sketches and plots that have as many branches as a forest of trees.

Yes, it seems my characters have declared mutiny!

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