Character Guilt

This post was originally written on 5th February 2012; apologies for the delay in publishing – Richard

Something that has been on my  mind a lot as I work on my two novels, The Last of the Steamers and Colonisation – especially Colonisation these days is a certain amount of shall we say guilt about being judged by readers about what my characters – fictional characters of my creation – do.

Let’s look at an example from Colonisation that I’ve been working on:

The protagonist of Colonisation, Rad meets only a couple of initially-friendly faces on his initial journey to Mars; first being Jon Stryker, who becomes his best friend, and Kyra, who in invariably falls in love with. Now, Jon Stryker has issues of his own, one being quite importantly his realisation that he is in love with Rad. His Male. Best. Friend. I think you can see where this is going, dear reader – there is an attempt to act on these deep-down feelings, rejection, an undercurrent throughout a lot of the book where this thing is unaddressed by Rad and Stryker and the burning jealousy of Rad and Kyra’s love and how far Stryker sees Rad go for the girl he loves.

This is not a blurb!

And this is meant to be science-fiction, and that’s going by what’s already in Draft 1!

What I’m quite self-conscious about is how people are going to react when they read these scenes and if they make the simplistic assumption that the characters = me. I know it’s silly really, and really lovely readers should be able to delineate where the characters are borne of my mind but are not me, and will not judge me on that basis.

When I set out to write Colonisation, I didn’t have Rad falling in love, I didn’t have anywhere near as much epic chivalry - not that I’m complaining – and nor did I have Stryker either as gay or falling in love with my protagonist (of all the beefcakes, had to pick the one the story is told through, I know! How inconsiderate of him!). It all developed naturally, these things happened to my characters as I got to know them myself. It was fun for me too, to realise that, yes, Rad would to anything to for Kyra, and yes, Stryker would realise that he’s madly in love with Rad too. And all this with the trials and tribulations of setting up the first human colony on Mars and the hilarity that ensues from that endeavour.

What I’m trying to do with the redrafting work on Colonisation is to say to those phantoms who I’m seemingly terrified of “judging” me by what my characters do: “screw you guys!” I’ve gotten over mostly that terrible fear of being thought of as my characters, which is silly. They were borne of my mind, but importantly aren’t me, guys. Yes, because I wrote the darn book, there will always be things influenced by me and how I interpret things, but I don’t want an Author Avatar, nor intend or desire any of my characters to be one. No thanks.

Just sit back and enjoy some – and I hope it is – fun science fiction and get to know these characters yourselves, and hopefully you’ll realise it’s not just my twisted demented mind that’s thrown all this in there for fun. Part of the fun I’ve found of writing is not only telling a story to other people, but experiencing that story for the first time as it is written. That’s a great feeling!

In regards to my twisted imagination I’ll talk about that more in my next entry, about my tendency, I’ve noted to kill characters in quite gruesome and elaborate ways. Then you can call me a sick bastard! But I won’t care so much then!

As an aside; any fellow writers also confronted by this fear of being judged by what their characters do?