Lives of writers and characters

Quite a few well-known writers have had strange, exciting, or adventurous lives. Ernest Hemingway was an ambulance driver during WWI, after which he did things like bull running in Spain and safaris in Africa; Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) was a gold prospector, worked on the steamboats going up and down the Mississippi, and served in the American Civil War. Jack Kerouac served on sailing vessels before he started the road trips all over the U.S. that he mined for the material of his famous novel On the Road. There are others too numerous to mention.

This leads many writers to wonder whether or not they need to go out and have some adventures before they settle down to write (or during the writing, or after the last thing but before the next one). In extreme cases, this notion combines with the “write what you know” misinterpretation to convince would-be writers that they have to experience everything they write about, in addition to having ridiculously exciting lives. (This is sometimes a notion that affects readers, resulting in incidents like the one in which an outraged reader complained about the immoral life the writer of a particularly spicy Romance novel must be living in order to have written the sex scenes. To which the writer replied, “That is all wishful thinking, madam.”)

These folks are forgetting three things: first, writers lie for a living. It’s our business to make things sound interesting and dramatic, and it would be weird if we didn’t apply that to our own lives at times. There are certainly writers whose adventurous lives were independently documented and verified, but there are plenty of others who deliberately created the legends of their own adventures, exaggerating minor mishaps into more story-worthy incidents.

Second, writers have families who can often serve as adventurous or dramatic source material, either directly (my twin cousins, Miki and Julie, are fur trappers in Alaska; my great-grandfather went prospecting for diamonds in Alaska and gold in Peru) or indirectly, as with some of the probably-apocryphal stories about umpty-great-grandpa James, who, family legend has it, was a British spy in the American Revolution (nobody has ever confirmed this, nor the other unlikely tale, which was that he emigrated to the U.S. because he had been caught messing around with one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting and had to skip town in a hurry). If you go back far enough, or sideways far enough, everybody’s family tree has interesting stories. The trick is to find them out.

Third, and perhaps most important, is the fact that everyone’s life is normal and ordinary and not very interesting to them, but it’s often just those normal, ordinary, boring things that fascinate all the people who aren’t living that life. One of my friends, some years back, started a fantasy series that began in a small rural town very like the one he’d grown up in. He intended to dump the main character into the fantasy universe and never look back, but from the minute he started passing the manuscript around for comments, the thing every reader asked about were the details of small town life – that was the part that was wonderful and strange to all his city-raised friends.

My fur-trapper cousins will go on and on about their experiences visiting New York City, talking about things like the traffic and the noise and the lights, but if you ask them about their last trapping run, they say things like, “It wasn’t very exciting. Julie did go through the ice crossing a river at one point, but she got hold of one of the sled dogs and he pulled her out, so she didn’t die.” To them, city traffic is strange and therefore fascinating; falling into a frozen river is about as interesting as me slipping on some ice in front of my house – it only counts if somebody got hurt.

Human beings have a cognitive bias toward things that are new, and away from things that are familiar and known to be safe. New things are interesting because they might be dangerous; they might be fun and exciting; they might be tasty or poisonous or both. This is true for readers, for writers, and for the writer’s characters.

For writers, it’s important to remember that the bits that they find fascinating may not be terribly interesting to a lot of readers, but it’s even more important to remember that the bits they find boring may be the things readers find fascinating. Cutting the “boring bits” is only a great idea if the writer can accurately identify which bits their readers are going to find boring. The trick here is to put in enough to tantalize the readers who think that’s the fascinating bit, but not so much that it annoys the readers who agree that those parts are boring, boring, boring. It’s not an easy line to walk, but the first step is being aware of it.

The other thing writers need to remember is that their characters have this same bias (unless the characters are non-human). This can have a major impact on the choice of viewpoint and viewpoint character. In a first-person or tight third-person viewpoint, what the viewpoint character notices (or doesn’t) and how they notice it will need to be reflected in the narration and description. A viewpoint character who is used to New York City traffic, noise, and lighting isn’t going to notice or react to it unless there’s something unusual happening – the traffic has stopped, the noise has suddenly gotten louder or softer, the lights have gone out or exploded. A viewpoint character who is totally unfamiliar with cities will be reacting to all of it, probably on overload from all the strangeness, and will be unable to correctly identify what’s unusual and worth paying attention to (thinking “thank goodness all those cars are finally gone” instead of “there’s no traffic at two in the afternoon? Something is very wrong…”). A POV who’s seen New York on TV but never actually been to a city is going to be somewhere in the middle.

In omniscient or camera-eye viewpoint, the writer has more leeway in terms of how they describe things and what they choose to describe (since they’re not tied to a POV character who won’t notice things that are, to them, ordinary). The characters, however, still won’t notice “normal” things, and will notice “not-normal” things, and this will affect their reactions. In omniscient, the writer can dip into whatever head they choose to let the reader know what different characters are thinking, but in camera-eye (and for all non-viewpoint characters in first or tight-third), the writer has only the character’s actions, words, and expressions to hint at what this particular character thinks is interesting/not-normal and how they’re reacting to it.