Elements of Fiction (55)
Element 55: Choice
Once you have a character in mind (see previous Element of Fiction), a vital attribute of that character must be free will.
Sometimes that will is so free that he or she or it decides to go and do things you had never planned, and do not necessarily condone. In this case, thank your lucky star, you have a character who is truly alive. Let him live, let her go her own way, just take good notes.
The issue of determinism has been pondered by writers, and here are few of those musings.
The first from Ayn Rand, “Hugo makes characterization an issue of free will all the way down to the roots of human personality.”
She then adds, “If man has no choice, you cannot write a story about them, nor is there any sense in reading one.”
While John Gardner cautions, “No fiction can have real interest if the central character is not an agent struggling for his or her own goals but a victim, subject to the will of others.”
John Fowles has also pondered this, “One interesting field is the problem of free will. This is the question of whether you can discover enough about yourself, whether you can accept enough about your own past, to become what we call an authentic character: someone who is in control of his own life, able to withstand all its anxieties. To me, any novel which doesn’t have something to say on the subject of whether and why the characters are authentic or unauthentic is difficult to take seriously. It is merely an entertainment.”
Yours Truly puts it this way, “The ability to choose is what makes us human.”
Flannery O’Conor’s reflections, “While predictable, predetermined actions have a comic interest for me, it is the free act, the acceptance of grace particularly, that I always have my eye on as the thing which will make the story work.”
“The novelist does not write about general beliefs but about men with free will, and [that] there is nothing [in our faith] that implies a foregone optimism for man so free that with his last breath he can say No.”
“An absence of free will in these characters would mean an absence of conflict in them, whereas they spend all their time fighting within themselves, drive against drive.”
And back to John Gardner, “The writer who denies that human beings have free will is one who can write nothing of interest. Stripped of free will — robbed of all capacity to fight for those things they aspire to and avoid those things they fear — human beings cease to be of anything more than scientific and sentimental interest. For the writer who views his characters as helpless biological organisms, mere units in a mindless social structure, or cogs in a mechanistic universe, whatever values those characters may hold must necessarily be illusions, since none of the characters can do anything about them, and the usual interplay of value against value that makes for an interesting exploration of theme must be a cynical and academic exercise.”
“Every detail that enters the story will have an influence on the degree to which the characters suffer and eventually on what they choose.”
“What starts the novel on its dangerous course, in other words, is not Mickelsson’s bad luck (that is background information which must somehow be worked in) but Mickelsson’s active choice, his quest decision.”
Enough said.
© Wolfstuff
