…or Surprise! Your characters had something else in mind!
Revisions. How do I love them? Let me count the ways. They’re the writer’s version of the ‘second chance at love’ trope. You know, stories where the hero and heroine had a relationship in the past, broke up, and have met again with fear (he/she will just hurt me again) and loathing (that louse broke up with me for no good reason!). Both parties have sworn never to have anything to do with one another again. Except then that pesky author (me) keeps throwing them together, making them lean on and value one another all over again.
Revisions are another chance to fall in love with your characters. Seriously, I’m not the only one who finishes a manuscript and declares, “I’m sick of you people! I want to write about new characters! Go away and never darken my brain again.”
Someone somewhere suggested putting the manuscript away for a few months and moving on to other projects, and I heartily wish I could recall whose advice that is. I owe that writer big time.
Revisions are where I can get rid of talking heads, remove unneeded exposition, or add more descriptive detail if there’s no strong sense of place in a scene.
When I pulled out my most recent completed manuscript after a rest, I found that I really did like the hero and heroine. The baddie had a reason for his actions. Everyone had goals! They had motivations! They even had conflict, although I’m looking for ways to beef that up in the second draft. I hate making my characters hurt, but revisions are just the place to break their hearts into smithereens.
I even discovered an unintended theme. I started out writing about the healing power of love and the importance of forgiveness. Those themes are still in the story, but my characters all worked together to create their own idea. Every character in the manuscript is driven to protect his or her family. The hero, the heroine, the villain, even a couple of urchins that showed up in the course of the story all have family members or names or reputations that require his or her protection. In theater, this is sometimes called the spine of a play – a goal that is shared, even if unconsciously, by every character in the piece.
This kind of surprise doesn’t bother me. I’ve come to believe that no matter how thoroughly writers develop personalities and backstories, we know our characters better after we’re done with that draft. During the writing of a manuscript, I discover things about my characters I did not know when I started. It’s not a matter of pantsing. I write out biographies for my characters. I write scenes to show how they got their deepest emotional scars. Those won’t appear in the book, but it plumbs their emotions so that I know in my bones how much they hurt.
Is your writing an adventure? Do you get excited when a nugget of information reveals itself about your protagonist? Isn’t it fun?
Ann Stephens 