How changing a character can save a story
A little trick I have found to be very useful when I am struggling to create a character who will serve my needs is to change something dramatic about them, such as their sex.
Often, when starting out on the process of writing a character I have a real person in mind. It’s inevitable. The characters I write emerge from my experiences.
But clinging to a real person can create difficulties. If I am just trying to reproduce on the page someone I already know, I will be constrained by what I know about that person.
It is a limiting dimension at a time when I really need to find ways to tap into my creativity.
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But if I change it around, make the man a woman or the woman a man, or make them taller or smaller, or a different nationality, or interested in a different sport, it can liberate me to do the real work of a fiction writer, namely to create characters and stories that have never before existed.
So much of writing is liberation; giving yourself the freedom to explore and create.
The characters only succeed when they come from my mind. It’s not a memoir I am writing, nor is it a faithful account of an historical event or era.
In my debut short story collection Second Chance and Other Stories, the story Going Back is about a soccer player, Jenny, contemplating a return to competitive sport.
She’s been in a coercive relationship. Her confidence has been badly diminished. Physically, she’s let herself go.
I needed a coach to metaphorically hold her hand. I wanted that coach to know the old Jenny well and also to recognise how a return to the game might be engineered, if Jenny was so minded.
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I had a male doing the job initially and something about it didn’t work. I think it was because I wanted a shared history between Jenny and the coach, a tenderness almost, and female to female facilitated that much better.
When I made the coach female, the story found its way home. And Jenny found her way back. It is not good to be overly wedded to what you create. A flexibility will serve you well. Another day, a male coach might have been perfect. Just not that day.
MORE ON THE CRAFT OF WRITING: See HERE. I’m adding to this on an ongoing basis. As I learn, hopefully you can too. Every day is school day for us all.
