The Myth of Characters
They say fiction is all about characters. And that’s true in the same sense you can say that sailing is all about boats. There is some implicit fun about ships, but if sailing was all about fun then you wouldn’t need much more than a surf board. Sailing is about getting out to new places, connecting those places and solving problems with buoyant conveyances. Likewise, characters exist in stories for what they convey.
After I had read the first twenty pages of the Diana Wynne Jones novel, I was struck how completely I knew the characters. The fantasy novel barely scratched the surface of weapons and armor. Many authors make the mistake of describing their characters with detail but in isolation or only in the moment. An experienced writer like Jones describes the web of relationships which surround the main characters.
- How are the characters related?
- How do the characters view each other?
- What problems do the relationships and perspectives create?
What does this kind of introduction do for the story? It gives the brain reading the story a social map and that’s good because the human brain craves this kind of information. Take a mental inventory of what you discuss or overhear during a day and see how much describes the perspectives people have of each other.
Writing Page by Page
The Islands of Chaldea ends with a note from Ursula Jones which gives a glimpse of her sister’s writing process. Diana never made notes. Her process followed the same process she had followed as a child. She would write, share what she wrote with her siblings and then would have to keep writing when they begged for more. Having read many books by Diana Wynne Jones I can easily imagine a hungry audience nipping at her heels.
For me, who suffers from analysis paralysis, I find Diana Wynne Jones inspirational. She wrote great stories one page at a time. They were not perfect stories, but the stories moved swiftly from start to finish, carrying readers from one place of safety to another.
