Emulating characters
Jan. 25th, 2007 08:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienI haven't had much energy lately, and the words have not been flowing. It doesn't help that the meta-narrative is going Moebius on me, or something. It would make a certain amount of sense, I realized last night, to have Defector come after Undone, except that the children would be the wrong ages; Undone needs them to be old enough to be left with their aunt for weeks while both parents are off having separate adventures, while Defector pretty much requires the younger one to be a babe in arms. (And no, they can't have another baby. Number two was already pushing the physiological limits.)
I had a thought over the weekend sometime. I am not a professional writer, so take this for what little it's worth. Non-writers tend not to understand when writers say that their characters refuse to do certain things, or otherwise seem to impute agency to them. For me, at least, I think what is going on is that I run (fairly crude) models of the characters in my head, like emulating one operating system on top of another in order to run an old game or something. So I have a general idea in my head of what has to happen, and even what people might say, but when I come to write it down I run it through the Harry-emulator, or whatever, and it doesn't come out quite the same, and sometimes it just doesn't come out at all.
In my case, of course, I also get deflected from where I intended to go by the constraints of the language, because English doesn't have enough words and insists on using the same one for two concepts I want in the same sentence, or the word I need has too many syllables or too few, or I can't get over the exact thing I wanted to say without using three semi-colon splices in the same sentence. Maybe real writers have enough control over the language to avoid that sort of problem? Or maybe that's the point of rewriting -- put down the words that go where you want to go, and fix them later while keeping the what-happens in place? I've never been able to do that; I need something that looks like a grammatical sentence, at least, and preferably one with the right rhythm and tone, before I can move on at all.
I had a thought over the weekend sometime. I am not a professional writer, so take this for what little it's worth. Non-writers tend not to understand when writers say that their characters refuse to do certain things, or otherwise seem to impute agency to them. For me, at least, I think what is going on is that I run (fairly crude) models of the characters in my head, like emulating one operating system on top of another in order to run an old game or something. So I have a general idea in my head of what has to happen, and even what people might say, but when I come to write it down I run it through the Harry-emulator, or whatever, and it doesn't come out quite the same, and sometimes it just doesn't come out at all.
In my case, of course, I also get deflected from where I intended to go by the constraints of the language, because English doesn't have enough words and insists on using the same one for two concepts I want in the same sentence, or the word I need has too many syllables or too few, or I can't get over the exact thing I wanted to say without using three semi-colon splices in the same sentence. Maybe real writers have enough control over the language to avoid that sort of problem? Or maybe that's the point of rewriting -- put down the words that go where you want to go, and fix them later while keeping the what-happens in place? I've never been able to do that; I need something that looks like a grammatical sentence, at least, and preferably one with the right rhythm and tone, before I can move on at all.
