No they did not

[ritaxis]

Dorothy Heydt used to say that the moment for her when she dropped a book was when she found herself saying "I don't care about these people."

For me, it's when I find myself saying, "no, they did not," meaning that I do not believe they did or said what the author just told me they did or said.

Sometimes it's because the story is set in a real world milieu and there are particular ways that the people behave in that milieu, sometimes it's a matter of physics or biology, sometimes it's the human emotion or thoguht process that's wrong.

I'm struggling with an old Vonda MacIntyre right now, because of this. I don't think I'm going to finish it, thoguh it has many elements that I love, and it's Vonda MacUIntyre, and I've enjoyed other books of hers. And this is part of a series I started a long time ago.  But the characters are doing things I don't believe they would do and they are saying things I don't believe they would say. And so are the institutions  behind them. And it's getting too annoying to proceed, so I think I'll read myself to sleep with cookbooks again.

Comments

[ellarien]

If I was guilty of that in my own writing, it would be because it seemed to make sense in the outline, but by the time I got to writing it the characters or background had developed enough for it not to work. I derailed the plot of my November novel by deciding not to blindly follow the outline when I hit one of those, and I'm still struggling with the fallout. I think this may (sometimes) be what people mean when they say their characters refused to co-operate; at some -- possibly subconscious -- level they're recognizing a mismatch between planned plot actions and what the characters would actually do.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

My response to that is 'it's aliiiive' - when characters refuse to do what I thought might happen, it means that I have a good enough grasp of their personalities and wishes to actually write. (If *I* try to make character do something, I get a chunk of flat prose and then a complete standstill. Usually up to 10K after the problem, so it's not productive at all.)

I never feel that I know world and characters enough before I've started writing them, so any outline will be based on my assumptions of what *I* think might happen and what *I* might do. If I get the characters right - if I listen to them - then of course they react differently.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

That's my materialist explanantion of that phenomenon too. The way I describe the process is "I know everything that happens before I start. I am wrong."