Rachel: CURSE YOU, CHARACTERS!

Okay, this is a totally weird thing to post about, but I was just sitting around and writing and I needed to take a break so I decided to post about a freakish problem that my stupid characters have been giving me because I CAN. So I was working on Death List (which some of you may or may not already know a little bit about from reading my page) and it has like a million characters in it, right? Well, first of all, let me say that that is my own fault; I love inventing characters, and this book idea was just kind of perfect for having a lot of them. I actually don't know exactly how many I have because I am a horrible author and if I don't have my notebook full of notes about my books by me, I totally forget EVERYTHING. Let me go find it really quickly...

*elevator music playing in background*

Okay, so here we go. In this particular book, I've got (in no particular order): Leala Cash, Wolfe Livingston, Ezekiel Cato "ZeCat" Everton, Bryony-Rose Baker, Ziv Martell, Vine Fairfax, Roth Opensaw, Alva Everton, Edwin Everton, Zylo Herrick, Price Herrick, Galatea Reed, Web Adler, Alyss Younge, Tyson Moore, Cadmus Buck-Edwards, Faust Mathers, and Freedom Williams. Believe it or not, these are all actual names. Anyway, so this doesn't actually look like that many characters, I guess, but it is because I decided to do that thing that insane people do and tell this book from the points of view of just about everyone. Some of the characters that I listed aren't main characters, and therefore they won't have a chance to narrate the story or anything. In fact, the only people that do are Leala, Wolfe, ZeCat, Price, Freedom, Ziv, Vine, Roth, Alva, and maybe Webb...which is still a lot of people. Now here's the point of all of this. Because I "have" to write from the points of view of so many different people, it can get difficult to keep track of what they are all doing. My goal in this book is to have each of the major characters in the book meet at least once, which means that I have to tie all of the individual plots of the book together so that they can cross roads eventually...if that makes any sense. This would be simple enough with proper planning and figuring out a technique to keep my simple mind on track. But here's my stupid problem with my stupid characters. I created them, right? They are figments of my imagination and of my mind. I am their GOD, so I should be able to control them just like anybody can control their characters. I can...but sometimes I can't! Crazy, I know, but they can be SO unpredictable! It drives me absolutely INSANE! I'm like "oh, I know exactly how I want this chapter to go, hurray!" and I'm typing away and then one of them does something that I really did not expect him/her to do and I have to tweak the plot so that it still heads in the direction that I want it to go.

For example, I have this character, Wolfe, who is seventeen and is, long story short, a runaway and something of a criminal. He basically survives on pick-pocketing people, and one magical day he decides to pickpocket Freedom. Wolfe was supposed to just rough him up a little, get Freedom's money, and leave, but INSTEAD Wolfe turns out to be much less stable than I thought and decides to stab Freedom, who happens to be one of my main characters that I definitely could not kill off so early in the story (this was like chapter three or something). In turn, Freedom turned out to be way more desperate to hold on to his money than he was supposed to be, which I ALSO did not see coming. So I had to teak the plot to ensure that Freedom was not killed and could continue to be a character in the book.

Why, you may ask, didn't I just decide to have Wolfe NOT stab Freedom and save myself the trouble? Well, I honestly am not sure. When I am sitting around and typing away, I often get really in to my stories and let the characters just kind of do their thing, whatever that might be. It's hard to explain, but even though these people aren't real people, they are real on paper and therefore are almost as difficult to boss around as actual human beings. It's silly and, like I said, a completely weird thing to post about, but I just felt like ranting about it. This post is about five hours long, so I'll wrap it up, but I figured if anybody would understand what the hell I'm talking about, it would be you guys.

-Iridian