What is an author to do when their characters won’t cooperate? When do they do when they get to the end of Chapter Three, and instead of deciding to investigate the theft, agreeing to take the One Ring to Rivendell, heading off in search of the cattle rustlers, or signing on to the team that is searching for the plague cure, the main character turns to the police detective/wizard/sheriff/medical research expert and says “That’s your job”?
The author has at least five basic options here; the trouble many run into is that they find all of them unacceptable for various reasons.
First, the author has the option of glaring at the text, erasing the words “That’s your job” and replacing them with “OK, I guess I’ll do it.” If that is all the author does, this basically turns the character into a cardboard puppet who is simply following the author’s plot. I’ve known a couple of authors for whom this worked, mainly because they nearly always focused on complex, heavily event-driven plots rather than on characterization, but it isn’t something most writers can make work unless it follows their natural process. For the vast majority, turning the main character into a plot-puppet sucks the life and interest out of the story, as well as making it unrealistic, unbelievable, and generally “bad writing,” so this is clearly not acceptable.
Second, the author has the option of explaining to the reader why the character could and would get involved in spite of initially recognizing that it really isn’t their job. In other words, the author has to figure out what would motivate this particular character to step into the plot anyway, and then present this motivation to the reader in a plausible fashion.
This tends to be difficult, because a character who has unexpectedly proclaimed “This isn’t my job” is usually well-established in the author’s head as, well, the kind of person who would do that. In my experience, this makes it next door to impossible to change one’s concept of the character, meaning that one has to come up with a really powerful reason for them to change their mind … which will likely mean changing the plot and/or the focus of the story. If the protagonist only agrees to move ahead because something personal is at stake, the central story problem has, for them, changed from “solve the mystery/find the cure/catch the rustlers” to “save my reputation/daughter’s life/family home.” Authors who have put a lot of work into their original plot-plan tend to resist throwing it out the window, or even reducing it to secondary status.
The other thing that’s difficult about this shift is that many writers find it extraordinarily difficult to get into the heads of characters who don’t think like them. At the very least, it is uncomfortable. Coming up with a believable reason for the protagonist to change his/her mind about getting involved is hard, because the author wouldn’t do it. So, again, not an acceptable choice, because neither the character nor the plot end up being the ones the author started off to write about.
Thirdly, the author can accept the unexpected change and follow the character. What happens to George after he turns down the detective/wizard/sheriff/expert? The author chose him as the protagonist for a reason. So without George’s participation, does the problem get worse? What were the things he was supposed to do that now don’t get done? Or does the decision affect George’s life in other ways – does he feel guilty for turning his back on the situation, even if it wasn’t his job? How does that play out in the rest of his life? Or does some completely new and different problem surface? Nobody has a problem-free life, after all…
Again, following the character and working out the logical consequences of his/her decision means jettisoning most or all of the original plot. Lots of authors are unwilling to do this. Furthermore, it has many of the same problems of digging into the character’s head as the previous option.
Fourthly, the author can accept the character’s unexpected action and follow the problem. George says “Not my job; bye!” and walks out the door; the detective/wizard/sheriff/expert looks at everyone else and says “Well, then, let’s get to it, people”; and the folks who are left get to work on solving the problem. This means a change in protagonist, and probably also a change in viewpoint character (unless the author has been using omniscient or a secondary Dr. Watson type as the viewpoint). It means a lot of the details of the original plot are going to change significantly, as George will no longer be around to do things and the new characters are different people who probably will choose to do different things.
Switching protagonists is a dicey proposition that gets more and more dicey the further into the story this happens. Even after one or two chapters, the reader has settled in to expecting this character’s story. Dumping the putative “main character” feels like a bait-and-switch. I’ve seen it work a couple of times, but it isn’t easy and it has structural ramifications. And there’s the problem of the author getting into yet another new character’s head, probably one they’re not quite comfortable with (or they’d have made that one the protagonist in the first place). Once more, this option is hard to do, involves jettisoning large chunks of plot and probably doing some rewriting, and involves difficult characterization stuff, as well as not writing about the character the author chose to start with. So authors reject it.
Finally, the author can glare, growl, flip back to Page One, and rewrite the story so far with a completely different character as protagonist, one who wouldn’t say “Not my job.” Which means not writing about the original character, and probably changing some plot as well (since Jake is unlike George and therefore probably won’t do quite the same things George would have done.
What all these options boil down to is: Make what you have work (force the issue or motivate the character), or do something else (follow the character or the problem in this new direction, pick a different protagonist). The author’s job is to make readers believe that the characters they are portraying would do the things they do in the story, even though those characters are not idiots. If anybody told you it was going to be easy, they lied.
Maybe it’s because the writers who influenced me created protagonists like Telzey Amberdon and Jack Holloway and Archie Goodwin and the rest. I’ve just never wanted to write about “not my job” people.
And I have to say, after retiring from a career in the civil service, if I **********never*********** hear “not my job” “can’t help you” “no process for that” or any of the other excuses not to address a problem again, it’ll be too soon!!
Okay, I can breathe now.
I’ve just never wanted to write about “not my job” people.
Same here.
Now, “it’s not my job but I’m doing it anyway” can require a little fiddling (amateur detectives, etc.), but that’s the character justifying their involvement to the other characters/the outside world. As long as the character herself wants to be involved, something usually works out.
I think I have the opposite problem to our kind hostess. Does anyone have advice on how to make plot-obedient secondary characters less cardboard and more real?
Assign them traits!
For instance, you could go through the Olympians and pick one and assign each character to be a little like that god. This nonentity is Ares and has a bad temper, that one is Hestia and just wants to stay home, the third is Hermes and up to some mischief. . .
Effects can be large.
Hmm. This is probably the slow method, but you could also try throwing various potential actions at a character until you reach an action that makes them say, “No. Absolutely not. What do you take me for?!” (And then you can back away from that action, smile at the character, and say, “Someone who wouldn’t do that, apparently. Thank you for finally disclosing some information about yourself. What other behaviors can I rule out?”) Depending on how the character reacts – or how much resistance your own mind puts up against the idea of the character performing each possible action – you could either build an idea of who the character isn’t, and learn more about who they are by the options that are left, or you could eventually learn that the character is actually willing to go along with essentially any plot action and is therefore probably a horrifyingly amoral person…but, hey, at least you know that now? (Warning – this probably does take a ridiculously long time, unless you start to get more hints of the character’s personality along the way by the details of how they accept or refuse each possible action. The assigning-traits method is probably much faster and more reliable.)
A sixth method is to have the police detective/wizard/sheriff/medical research expert reply with “It is your job; you’re authorized; you’re deputized; you’re wanted as part of the team” and have the character accept that, even if only provisionally. It helps if they have a plausible reason why the character’s participation is wanted.
It also matters whether the character’s motivation for not taking on the job leans more toward “The job is too important; I don’t want to risk screwing things up when others have a better chance of success” or “The job isn’t important enough; I would rather it go undone than to get personally involved.” The second is a lot harder to fix, IME.
Sometimes your characters know more about writing than you do.
At one point in writing my first novel, the protagonist dug in her heels and said, “I don’t like what you have planned; I won’t go there.”
“Well, where *do* you want to go?”
She crossed her arms, looked away, and said, “I’m not going to tell you.”
This impasse was finally bridged when someone in our writer’s group suggested I throw at the protagonist the worst thing that could happen. (See previous posts.) The protag looked at this and said, “Yes—that’s much better.” And on we went.
Yes — I tend to agree with Kevin and Liz that I’d rather read about “I’m taking care of this” people than “Not my job” people (see Threbus’s speech to Pausert near the end of _The Witches of Karres_.
But that creates a potential pitfall: if I assume all my characters are born crusaders willing to take on any difficult task, then my characters are all going to fit into a fairly small box, the box I’m comfortable with. It’s helpful to me to force myself to ask, why are _these_ characters willing to do _this_ heroic or unselfish thing?
Rick
How about “not my job, because I have something genuinely more important to do”? Or “not my job, because while I do have some relevant skills, the people whose official job it is don’t like amateurs and I am basically law-abiding”?
There’s plenty of space between enthusiastically jumping into the sewer and wanting to have a quiet life.
Sometimes, it’s as simple as: “This needs to be done. Nobody else is doing it.” Looks around, and around, then looks in mirror. “Well, then….”
Of course this can backfire too.
Author: I’m going to write a story where a sturdy, likely, village lad confronts and slays the dragon!
Author: So to set this up, I’m going to have the dragon arrive and start preying on the sheep and the occasional shepherdess.
Sturdy Lad: Does no one care to do anything about this dragon? Very well, I will do something myself.
Sturdy Lad: I will go off on a Quest to find and bring back a dragon-slaying knight!
Author: (Facepalm)
Sturdy Lad: Hey, I’m not stupid. I want a plan that will have some chance of success. If I confront the dragon myself, I’ll just be providing it with an additional snack.
That could be a lot of fun, actually.
(And the Sturdy Lad is still *doing* something about the problem. Recruiting the right help and getting it pointed in the right direction is a form of dealing with it!)
And if the Lad’s journey searching for the Knight happen to end up teaching him a lot about how to fight, and indeed how not to fight, dragons, well…
Well, they don’t all have to be motivated this way. In my first novel, I put both protagonists in an uncomfortable situation, hers worse than his, and his motivations were to get himself out, and especially get her out.
But Character Motivations was a different entry, so I’ll stop.
This is a different kind of being uncooperative, but I once started a story where the protagonist was the registrar at a school of magic and known to all the students as the person you go to to talk about your troubles. My original intention was to have him end up in a romantic relationship with a student, but it quickly became clear that this particular character simply would not abuse his position that way. I ended up deciding to change it to a mentor-type relationship (although I then got distracted by other things and never finished the story).
If you are exploring the story into life, there may not be future plot to be sacrificed. If Frodo had not offered to take the Ring — well, Tolkien did not know what would happen next when he did, either.
I just wanted to add, one of the sayings I most strongly believe is, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
No reason a character can’t realize some truth to that partway through the story.
True! (Of course, not all story-cooperative characters are actively resisting evil; more than a few people in my current work-in-progress are very enthusiastically volunteering to help with a project that really shouldn’t be happening at all. They’re cooperating with the story, though…)
I may be approaching a character-refuses-to-take-such-a-stupid-course-of-action situation, and, although that action’s end result would (sort of) solve a plot problem really conveniently, I don’t blame this character for not being self-sacrificing or stupid enough to volunteer. The possible action was her original job in the story, but she very sensibly abandoned that job (one of the this-really-shouldn’t-be-happening jobs) and doesn’t currently have a good reason to pick it up again. (So far, she’s one of the brighter and more successfully survival-oriented people in the story, and her similarly bright but not especially survival-interested friend has already tried to volunteer for almost every action that might further his goals and could definitely get him hurt or killed, so I neither want nor need to turn the first character into a self-sacrificing plot device. I’m either going to ditch my convenient plot idea, or see if I can give this character a plausible reason to take the plot-convenient option…)
The problem is less serious if you don’t start with the plot worked out in much detail. My second novel, as originally planned, had a protagonist and an antagonist, the latter being a well intentioned mage who had come up with a spell that he thought would have good effects and I thought would have bad effects.
He was not only well intentioned, he was also smart, so part way through the book he realized that he was wrong and switched sides. That worked quite nicely for the romance, which I hadn’t planned, between him and the protagonist’s daughter, who was usurping her fathers role. I ended up with two protagonists, the initial antagonist and the daughter of the initial protagonist.
Having everyone on the same side would have been a problem, but fortunately a new antagonist appeared. Since he was doing bad things with the best of motives, I paired him with the female protagonist’s beautiful best friend, giving me a second unplanned romance.
And finally a villain showed up, for all five of them — my initial protagonist was still around as an important secondary character — to oppose. The final scene between my initial protagonist and initial antagonist never happened, but I was happy with what replaced it.
One advantage of being at least part way on the seat of the pants side of the authorial spectrum.