andrewducker | Story versus Character

Over in his journal, Budgie talks about characters taking on a life of their own:

A while back, there was a minor (given the history of the two of them) dispute between John Byrne and Peter David about what characters in a story. As I recall, Peter David said that in Atlantis Chronicles, he originally had no plans for a character to do xxxxxxx, but that the character 'told him' what she was going to do, leading him to the point where it became apparent as to how the character would react in a given situation, despite that part of the story originally being conceived in a different way. Byrne fervently and vehemently disagreed, maintaining that the characters are creations and as such, the writer is supreme, deciding how a character behaves and acts.

My response to this was:

It's a case, to me, of realism. Or more accurately, of cohesiveness. If a character is defined with a particular personality, acts in certain ways and has recognisable traits, then not following those character traits when you get to a particular scene will cause cognitive dissonance in both the writer and the reader and remove suspension of disbelief.

If James Bond gets punch in the face and then collapses crying on the floor begging not to be hit again, the audience will instantly think "But James would never do that!" despite the fact that James is a character and will do anything the writer says he will.

Stories in some way fool the brain into accepting them as semi-real. People _care_ about the characters. Not as much as they care about real people (generally), but the feelings and relationships we have with them are real. If you break our expectations of them you'd better have a damn good reason for doing so, or you'll lose your readership.

This, to me, was the basis of numerous arguments with Joe about gaming. He wanted to tell stories - I didn't want to do anything that made characters act in an 'unrealistic' way. I was happy, in advance, to create characters that would be more suited to a kind of game, I felt that characters were far too fluid and unpredictable (in advance) to be used for the purpouse of telling a specific story without losing that suspension of disbelief.

I suspect a fair bit of that approach also comes from the fact that in real life I only see characters - the only way to see stories is in retrospect, when you can carve away all the bits that no longer seem important and get to the core of what now looks like it was a story. Doing it the other way round removes all the sense of wonder I have - of seeing how things will turn out for these people that I care about.