"My Characters Surprise Me"

Quite often in fiction writing, I hear someone observe that their characters surprise them. Some writers regularly talk about their characters as if they were independent people, whose actions the writer can't predict.

Personally, I find this slightly annoying: it's rather twee, and gives strength to the false impression that the writer is a sort of conduit through which the story flows, as if the writer's brain isn't controlling the story so much as surrendering to the spirits like a medium. Writing is, I think, a craft, and as such can't be done well by either a mechanical process or subconsciously. The correct method lies somewhere between the two.

(And don't get me started on people who talk endlessly about how awesome/messed up their characters are. First, they're not real, and, second, I don't care.)

However, while I'm never going to like the idea, I can actually see what people mean when they say that their characters surprise them.


Chekov's Gun, In Reverse

Might come in handy later

 

In a novel, it's a pretty basic rule that the characters can't and shouldn't do things that they wouldn't  concievably do. You've probably heard of Chekov's Gun: if the audience are told that there is a gun hanging on the wall, they will expect it to be used. This cuts the other way, too: if the story requires a gun to be produced in Act 3, it should be clear before then that it is possible that this might happen.

So, characters and events shouldn't happen that are completely unexpected, even if that expectation is only one of a number of possible outcomes. In that way, characters are predictable (or at least should operate within a range of predictable outcomes), and shouldn't be surprising the writer by suddenly acquiring abilities and histories that weren't hinted at before.

(I suppose I could imagine a story where a character acted wildly out of character, but I would expect the emphasis of the story to be about discovering why they did that. One example might be a mild-mannered man becoming a terrorist, or a spy being revealed as a double agent.)


A Range of Choices

That said, just because a character behaves in a certain style, that doesn't mean that there's no room for choice. When confronted with a large group of enemies, a veteran soldier might decide to attack, fall back, or just give up: depending on the circumstances, all of these might be decisions that that man might reasonably have made. And sometimes the author decides that one reasonable decision is better to the one that he'd originally planned to use.

Attack!

I think this is what writers mean when they say that their characters surprise them. You reach page 110, when Sergeant Jones is about to die bravely in a hail of bullets, and realise that, actually, it's much more powerful if he decides to surrender and the enemy shoot him anyway.


The Result

Of course, the writer has to be able to deal with the resulting fallout and its effects on the story. The murder of Sergeant Jones means that the enemy now look much more evil to the reader, and the reader is likely to want more payoff as a result. It's important not to lose your grip on the plot or the tone, or to let things done on a whim derail the novel. Because ultimately, no matter what your characters may or may not "decide" to do, it's your book.