Midnight rambles with my Characters
Almost always ending with their deaths
When I’m lying awake at night and can’t sleep, I summon the characters from the play or story I am working on to my bedside and take them from a walk. The thing is, a play is built around characters and their interactions and conversations. These characters are the products of their environments, so I find it interesting and exciting to take them on a journey to find out how they would react in other situations apart from the ones I have devised for them. The plot of a story is merely the mechanical means that allows me to demonstrate some aspect of my characters. More often than not, it will have to evolve as they do.
When I started out as a writer I discovered I was good at plot but rubbish at dialogue and it was only later I realised I had to understand a character and the way he or she moves through the world before I can encourage them to speak. And probably, the words I have given them at the beginning do not properly belong to them. Thus, the character evolves as the plot unwinds. It is as though they step out of the mist and become more sharply defined. They speak more clearly and more personally. The more I rough them up with the plot I have devised, the clearer they become. It is impossible to know a character fully at the beginning of a writing process and I must learn about them in the same way an audience will. And that means looking at them in four dimensions. Time as well as place. Here I sometimes find myself hemmed in by my clever plot. “How can this character act in such a new way?”
And so, I have to take the character for a midnight walk, talk to them, find where this new thing was lurking in their psyche. I may discover that they had a hard childhood, maybe they were in the services, raised abroad: something about them that hadn’t occurred to me before. At the end of a story the character, how they speak, what they do, how they react has become entirely different from the one I set out with. Or rather, I have come to understand them more thoroughly. They are no longer two dimensional products of my imagination but of their own selves with a past and a future as well as a place in space.
Sometimes a character becomes so clearly defined that I am tempted to write sequels but I think that is cheating. Cheating the character, that is. They have to live and grow at this time in this place and it’s lazy of me to drag them off somewhere else and just make use of what I know about them already. Basically, they have to die.
My characters have to live and grow through my play or story and I find it best to kill them off at the end.
However, a well defined character will carry on haunting me and joining my midnight walks and they will turn up in another play, dressed in other clothes, perhaps, ready to reveal another side to their reality.
