Generative Characters: A Moleskine Interlude

In which the Author explains free-range characters
and explores the futility of fresh paint on dry rot . . .

I gave you my devotion,
hiding nothing up my sleeve,
If I walked clean out of your life
would you even notice me leave?
So much tangled-up emotion,
should I stay or should I go?
If I walked clean out of your life
how long would it take you know?
Are we such good friends?
You used to say 'I love you',
you used to say 'You make me
feel alive and young';
now we're just a habit, a flavour,
one a month,
to titillate your tongue.
How sordid this has become
as the means approach the end
Oh, how long can we pretend
that we're still good friends?
--Peter Hammill, "Just Good Friends"

She seemed very regal to me
Just goes to show how wrong you can be
I'm gonna stop wasting my time
--Lou Reed, "Sad Song"

When people ask me about the book in terms of the writing's ebb and flow, I usually point them at this site because it saves me (and them) a potentially boring explanation. However, some folks inexplicably seem to persist in their interest, and for them I have two cocktail-party riffs--the how-do-you-start-a-rubber-band-ball routine (which I freely admit was stolen from another author because it exactly explains how I work), and a description of how characters eventually escape my control, leaving me to simply report on their actions. The latter is a guaranteed crowd pleaser, almost always eliciting nervous twitters because it conjures up crazy writers in Stephen King novels or Ronald Colman as the schizophrenic actor in A Double Life. As I say, a great cocktail party anecdote.

But what's often missed--especially with regard to the riff about free-range characters--is that both stories are deeply true: I'm not being amusing, facile or engaging in oversimplification . . .

Fast-forward to this weekend, and me struggling with a brand new bit of the novel--an insert for the book. It just wasn't happening, but in the worst way--deceptively. Here's how it normally goes: Think. Write. Rewrite. Think some more, write some more, rewrite some more. Repeat as often as necessary. When things go wrong, it's helpful if they go obviously wrong: Writer's block or a sticky problem means no words at all. Certainly bad news, but I quickly understand what's going on. However, this weekend an awful lot of words got banged down and polished only to be thrown away entirely. That's just not a problem; its a time sink--and, being hypersensitive to temporality these days, I really hate time sinks.

So I stopped, grabbed the messenger bag full of Moleskines, and settled into a Starbucks for a pop-in on Beatrice. It was time to catch-up with her. I suspected that part of the problem back at the word processor had to do with Beatrice evolving faster than I had kept up. The Moleskine devoted to her is an interesting artifact--its early pages are filled, in advance of writing the novel, with ideas about Beatrice, about what she might be like. Moving deeper into the notebook, you can see the initial ideas being refined and sometimes amplified. But then the notebook changes: You come upon a series of carefully dated sections about Beatrice that read more like reportage--which is literally what it is. When a character goes into free-range mode, I find it necessary to periodically describe what they're up to after-the-fact, when they've already behaved in certain ways. Call it ongoing pattern recognition. Each of the dated entries aren't reconstitutions of my total impressions of a character--they're merely updates; notes on those aspects that have most recently changed.

Which brings us back around to my cocktail set pieces--particularly the one about free-range characters. Because it's necessary to understand how characters take off without me before I share my newest impressions of Beatrice . . .