I hated it when authors would say things like, “I didn’t know what the character was going to do.” It shattered my belief in fully-formed narratives, that genius is complete, self-contained.
Likewise, I hated it when authors would say things like, “I let the character tell me what to write.” This is hand-in-hand with the above. I wanted Gods; I was getting free will.
I have written a book now, so now I understand where my ignorance was coming from. When making a movie, actors get to use their experience and background narratives in bringing life to the characters. But when writing a book, it’s just you. You have to invent the personas and inhabit them when required in the text. I was ignorant of this before I had to do it.
Ignorance firmly displaced, it now gives me great comfort seeing that other writers just… write, which is what inhabiting the characters is actually about. Start somewhere and let them lead you.
Jessica Anthony wrote a book called The Most, a novel where protagonist Kathleen Lovelace “decides to get into the pool in her family’s apartment complex one morning and won’t come out.” A great hook, and:
I only know that when Kathleen got up and decided to go for a swim, she didn’t know what would happen to her that day because I didn’t know.
Jessica Anthony
Interview with Chloe Norman on The Dirt
It turned into a psychological thriller that shifts perspectives between Lovelace and her husband set over the course of eight hours in a day, but the hook was all the seed she needed to begin.
A friend of mine, Michael Kearns, helped me edit the first few chapters of my book. He’s a writer himself. As he was working with me on my book, he told me over lunch he was inspired but that the only thing he had was one line: “Jesus walked into a bar.”
Less than three months later, he sent me a full manuscript based around that one quip. He didn’t know where “Jesus” was going to go, but he went and Kearns wrote.
I get it now. It doesn’t have to come out fully formed. That’s not how babies work.
Instead, you just have to start.