When Characters Rebel

    When I write a story I am in a constant tussle with my characters. From what to name them to the final climactic grand finale, I labor and I struggle to keep my cool around them just like a teacher does with spirited and rather stubborn students

    I am being told by veterans and experts in the craft of writing that this is not a new issue and apparently ever since the first quill was used to record a story, authors had a love-hate relationships with their characters.

A rebel heroine

“Do you think any writer would want to write about the life of any of us? “  She asked her friend all of a sudden.

    Two girls one Friday evening in a bar and already a little dizzy blabbering nonsense.

    The idea made her friend laugh.

    “Stop fooling around, two insipid chicks knowing nothing outside work and none of them currently part of a dramatic love affair, my dear, a writer would need imagination galore just to fill several anemic pages.”

      However, despite her friend’s cynical response, without being aware, she pushed her head and shoulders forward, chest protruding while sipping from her glass, trying to look mysterious, batting eyelashes the way she imagined heroines in a book do.

   " Maybe more mascara would have achieved the melancholic, over dramatic effect."

    In her mind, her own Universe, she was already visualizing the solar wind starting a fire so bright people were talking a storm already.  The same way they did when referring to someone possessing natural charisma.  The kind that emanated from the inside, not the fake one.

    She refilled her gin and tonic and with dreamy eyes allowed herself to be spoiled by a fantasy, precisely the feeling of being special, surrounded by the light and warmth of the cocoon known as being extraordinary...

    We’ll let the curtain fall over the rest of the night!

*

    "I wonder if there is such a thing as a heroine with a massive hangover".

    She asked herself trying to give a romantic chance to a rude awakening.  Instead, she entered the scene coughing, with disheveled hair, smudged make up running down her cheek, empty bed behind her, distraught and still holding the shape and warmth of a man.

      She imagined an utterly disappointed writer:  “What a character I chose”   

    "Damn, I need some coffee or I’ll go crazy."

      She knew of no novel heroine who smoked in the morning on an empty stomach.  Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, everybody knew that.  She should have a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice instead of stale coffee left over from yesterday.  Maybe some exotic fruit she would handle with ethereal fingers.

    But none of that was happening.  Will the writer still notice her when she was out of bed? 
What about if the writer read her mind?

    That was all right, that meant she ‘d have to arrange neatly all her personal thoughts, have them laid orderly on shelves in the wardrobe, maybe slip some potpourri on the shelves, to make them smell nice.  She should definitely think only in metaphors and toss away words like son of a b (beep) and f (beep) and h (beep).

    But, hey, maybe the writer would be open to edit her thoughts a little!

    "You know",  she suddenly thought, "when you're put under a magnifying glass, the time goes by slower, it actually crawls, and you can do nothing.  Nothing remarkable, nothing deserving to be immortalized on a page, in a novel."

      As a result, our heroine, already annoyed by all the pressure, walked out the back door taking the backstairs out of the story and slamming the door in the author’s face on her way out!

 

 

 

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  • 6/18/2009 12:58 AM Rebecca Emrich wrote:
    Thank you for look at my blog today.

    I shall hopefully be seeing more of you there. You have much to say about Romania and Transylvania and your voice is welcomed.

    Your writing is excellent. It is very vivid and wonderful. I shall return often.
    Reply to this
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