Do my characters really talk to me? Do I hold actual conversations with them?
I mean, when I write it out in muse-babble posts, that’s what it looks like. But in a lot of ways it feels like I’m translating what actually happens, which isn’t verbalization at all.
And that got me to the thought that actually started me writing this down, which is: why choose the depressing unrealistic setting? Why not the utopian one?
Author responsiveness to audience desire is a courtesy, in our non-commercial niche, not a market necessity, and certainly not some kind of moral imperative. The same, of course, holds true for audience response. I rather think it would do fandom good to remember this. As much as authors attempting to extort feedback are overreaching themselves, so, too, are readers who attempt to impose their priorities on the writers.
And that’s it, really; I think the choice of style really has to depend on what you want to do with the story in question. If you want to explore gritty, real-life problems, the realistic style is probably your best bet. If you want to write a story that makes the readers laugh and say “that’s so incredibly fucked up, but really a lot of fun”, then it’s time for the dj style.
Muses. Imaginary Friends. Characters.
As best I can tell, you know, the three have always been much the same thing to me. I vaguely recall having imaginary friends (one or two) who were not either my characters or someone else’s, but the characters, and the stories I could tell around them and me definitely predominated, as far back as I can remember. My terminology is the only thing that’s really changed over time, as I called them imaginary friends, and then characters, and then muses—that last happening when I got involved in fandom and fanfic, where it seemed to be the going vocabulary term.
At the simplest level, a little research to track down overviews and details is not particularly onerous for anyone with a modem. A very little research goes a remarkably long way. As for the really ambitious stories, wherein the author attempts to write about something fraught and complicated, well, she should expect to work harder for those.
An Essay about Creative Punctuation, Arguing for its Acceptability in Modern Usage
Spinning off from Resonant8’s entry on character making, and the discussion following, I find myself wandering in thought toward the writers of the Endicott Studio, toward Ursula K. Le Guin and her “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, and toward Lois McMaster Bujold and her Vorkosigan books.
At first glance, one of these things is not like the others.
