Are your characters fixed or can they/do they change as the story progresses?
“Fixed”? Are you kidding? My characters are a bunch of ingrates and hooligans. No matter how diligently I try to plot a story and define the characters, I’m always overruled by one terrorist or another—and frequently all of them. That’s one of the most frustrating—and at the same time, most fun—aspects of fiction writing, I think. Most fiction writers will back me up on this, I suspect: Characters become extremely concrete as we write. Just like real people, they change over time—and that’s a good thing. Evolving characters and storylines make for messy rewrites, but novelists couldn’t ask for a bigger boon.
Experience makes us who we are in real life. That’s no less true for fictional characters. Just like in real life, actions sometimes lead to unexpected reactions. That’s when you know you’ve got a story, not just a collection of events.
Do you have a writing routine?
I write non-fiction every weekday, because that’s a big part of my day job. (I’m still a journalist.) I try to get at least a little work done on one fiction manuscript or another every day, too, although I frequently find my brain fried after working ten- to twelve-hour days in the news biz. On weekends, though…. A really good weekend for me is two days of non-stop fiction writing. This may sound antisocial, but I look forward to escaping into an imaginary world after a workweek of immersion in some of the less-than-savory aspects of the real world.
If fictional characters insist on behaving badly, at least I can kill them off.
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