Public Author, Do Not Kill: Thoughts on Character Writing in the Age of Social Sharing

[a_flyleaf]

Here’s the catch: when you read a story I’ve written, you’re not thinking about me—you’re thinking as me. I’ve wormed my way inside your head (hi!) and briefly taken over your mind. You’re forced to reckon with my full complexity—or, at least, whatever fraction of that complexity I’ve managed to get down on the page.

When the story is over—or if you put it down midway—you’re free to think whatever you want. You can think, Dumb, or Boring, or Great, or, She looks like a bitch in her author photo, or, What the fuck did I just read?

But I don’t need to be there to absorb your reaction. In fact, I shouldn’t be. My role in the process is over. The interpretation, the criticism, the analysis telling you that you’re right or that you’re wrong or that you’re an asshole—that’s someone else’s job. I can’t, and won’t, take part.

—Kristen Roupenian, writing on her viral story “Cat Person” and the fallout of thereof; minor formatting tweaks made for emphasis

I really like “death of the author*.” I’m a fan of the idea that you don’t need to know a single thing about the storyteller to understand and appreciate their work, and I’m intrigued by yet increasingly wary of conversations around media that focus on writer intention. This ranges from the scholarly “you must have historical context for any of this to make sense” to the… decidedly less scholarly “the author condones $unsavoryThing featured in the story.”

(*For clarification’s sake, I’m mostly using writerly-type terms like author/writer/reader here, but I think this is applicable to any media primarily created by one person—so not big-budget movies with a writing team, necessarily, but maybe an indie game.)

I’m also increasingly feeling like it’s impossible to kill the author. Lindsay Ellis’ video essay on the subject goes into this with far more depth than I ever could, and applicable to larger media at that, but I’m not even gonna try going there today.

Instead, I’ve been thinking about people who post about their OCs and those characters’ stories (or lack of thereof) online. (“OC” in this context being Original Character, in case the acronym means something else in whatever corners of the internet you’re more familiar with.)

This is a metric crudton of detour-ridden rambling with no particular end goal, written first and foremost to sort out some thoughts I’ve been mulling over for the past month or so. It takes a big detour into character development talk that’s only tangentially related to the main topic. Editing? What’s that? You’ve been warned. (Or, uh, enjoy! if that’s your cup of tea.)

This could probably use some personal context. Oh, the irony.

For the record, I’m definitely not using “people who post about their OCs online” as a detached, third-person observer who would never do such a thing. I’ve been writing longer than drawing, as far as “actually taking it seriously” is concerned, and in recent years I’ve been more eager to share my projects. OC ask memes were a frequent addition to my dashboard, and I still talk regularly about my characters & stories with an online friend/fellow creator. It’s been pretty darn fun, and while internal vs external motivation is another topic for another time, I can’t deny it’s been super motivating knowing at least one person is interested in the stuff I write.

And yet. Because I love death of the author, and because I don’t want people to think any random trivia I spit out about a character once and promptly forget is “canon” if the actual story never touches on it, I hesitate to say much publicly unprompted. Nor do I honestly expect people to ask me things unprompted, because that’d require some degree of interest, and designs alone do not character interest make. (At least not to me. More on this later.)

This is fine with me. I want people to approach my writing blind, knowing as little about me and my thoughts on the story as possible, and to form their own judgments. I’d even be okay with people not knowing a thing about what my characters look like, in true prose-only style (although at this point I love art too much to not draw the cast). Anything else, that so-called “word of god,” is DVD bonus feature material. It has more weight just because the creator’s saying it, sure, but I’d hesitate to elevate that to the same “level” of canon as the actual work. You don’t need to know it. I’m flattered if you want to, but that’s the rest of the iceberg, and it’s underwater for a reason.

TL;DR however much (or little) I blab about my stories, if it’s not in the actual story, it’s trivia. You are invited and in fact encouraged to throw it out the window.

This is probably coming off really haughty considering I have yet to publicly complete a story, but you know. For the record. That’s my approach.

It is not, from what I’ve gathered from aforementioned OC-loving circles, a common approach.

Character as Commodity
Consider the website Toyhouse. Right on the front page: Character Repository. If you’ve been around roleplay forums at all, Toyhouse character pages might look familiar—they’re character biographies, sharing as much or little as the author deems fit. Sorry, not “author,” owner.

“View a gallery of all characters you've created and who their current and past owners are.” Owners? Character transfer? I’ve participated in the adoptable side of the internet exactly once, and have since done Jack Shit with the resulting design. This does not strike me as the realm of writers. Characters are presented as independent entities, not an integral part of storytelling.

Which I don’t think is Inherently Bad or whatever, mind. If people are just messing around with creative designs, all the more to ‘em! I’d personally hesitate to call “I just like the design and five-adjective personality blurb” a character, but I’m not here to be the fun police.

At the same time, I think if your primary approach to character-building is static, roleplayesque profiles and ask memes… it strikes me as a really easy way to get “I have all these characters and nothing to do with them.” You can build a story from here, of course, but good luck killing your darlings.

Get in their heads, see what makes them tick—and challenge them on it. “This is Bob and he’s sad and loves cats” is dead on the page to me, even if Bob’s design is really heckin cool. “Bob is a widower who’s had the same cat his entire life, and now the government wants to take that cat away because no regular feline can live for over fifty years and counting” is intriguing. We have not only a character (Bob) and something they hold dear (his cat), but also a conflict that poses a direct threat to what the character values (one Evil Government vs old-ass cat). Silly example I made up on the spot, but still. Bob the second can look like the plainest dude in the world, and I already care way more about him than cool-looking Bob whose character begins and ends at “sad and loves cats.” And that’s my writing tip of the day!

“We get it, Flyleaf, you’re a pretentious plot-focused writer who hates trivia. What does this have to do with death of the author and social media, again?”

Character as You
Let’s say that both these Bobs (hereon referred to as Sad Bob and Bobert, respectively) are part of separate stories. Suppose that Sad Bob has an epic journey to keep his cat out of the government’s clutches, and while Bobert does too, it’s not as developed as it could have been. But if all I know about these two is the aforementioned character blurbs, I’m not gonna be interested enough in Sad Bob to learn more about his story.

I’m interested in Bobert, though, so I look around for more info and give the story a try. I might go “hey, guys, I found this story about a guy and his immortal cat; it’s not the best but it’s pretty cool if you have some time to kill,” all the while not giving Sad Bob’s story a chance unless someone else convinces me it’s better than the character blurb implied. (And given that mediocre description, uh, good luck.)

Assuming both stories are relatively unknown beyond whoever the author initially shared it with—likely a friend group, along with however many social media followers—here’s the point I’m trying to make: The only reason I’d know about Sad Bob is if I was part of that initial audience. Unless asked for critique, I’d hold off on telling the author “hey, your character description kinda sucks and isn’t doing your story justice,” because 1) they’re my friend and 2) that’s kinda rude (again if unsolicited, which is yet another topic for another time).

Sad Bob is not (or doesn’t sound like) a character who can stand on his own. Sad Bob is best known as That Person’s OC. You see what I’m getting at?

And this, of course, is running on the assumption Sad Bob actually, y’know, has a story. Most characters I see described like Sad Bob… don’t. They’re barely more than those Toyhouse adoptables—eye candy, pretty faces with uninspiring profiles and no depth in sight. The creator just has this character because they like thinking about sad and cat-loving Bob is. Which, again, is fine! You have your fun.

I also find that the people making Sad Bob-like OCs, especially when those OCs aren’t part of an actual story, don’t want the author to die. This is generalizing, but (ah, the classic sign of something you should take with a mountain of salt) people making Sad Bobs just… do not care about separating themselves as a person from their work.

There’s something I find admirable about that, honestly. Writing entails a degree of vulnerability, and to declare loud and proud, to say “hey, I made this character this way because that’s what speaks to me most,” like… nice! No sarcasm, you own that!

I just… hope you don’t expect people (outside your friend group, at least) to be interested in your characters just because they’re an extension of you, because honey, you got a big cricket noise comin’. And god forbid you insist everyone perceive a character the way you intended, because we all know authors telling fandoms what to do ends really well for everyone involved forever :^D

Character as Author, Therefore…
There’s a gray area here, of course. I’m definitely not trying to suggest Sad Bob’s author sucks and should never try to put their characters out there, or that no one should talk about their characters in public ever unless there’s a story attached. Just commenting on a certain trend in “how people talk about their characters” that, in my opinion, tends to (but doesn’t always!) correlate to how said people approach writing in general. And emphasis on approach, not skill—there’s a reason the story example had Sad Bob’s being more developed.

Also, bad writing isn’t a moral flaw. Bad writing is not a sin. I want that nailed to a wall. (Not to mention “good” writing is subjective; I’d contest you on the details but that’s getting off-track again.)

A recurring problem with keeping the author alive, metaphorically speaking, is that it follows naturally to assume that a character/story is a reflection on the writer. Key word assume, regardless of author commentary (or lack of thereof).

This is a land full of mines and, generally speaking, I hate it. I know it’s inevitable. I know ideas don’t spontaneously spring forth fully-formed and without influence from any human ever, so yes, to an extent you can read into an author as a person through their work. I’d be lying if I said I never found out xyz autobiographical fact about a writer and how that played into their work and thought “oh, cool.”

But I can’t help but feel that this is the kind of psychoanalysis best left to the author themselves, especially in the generally-small-name not-likely-to-revolutionize-society context I’m talking about. No, just because Alice’s character is a jerkass doesn’t mean Alice is a jerkass, nor does her story having an unhappy ending mean she’s a miserable person. Maybe everyone in her story hates Scorpios because evil Scorpios are a meme and she didn’t think twice about it, not because she’s secretly an evil Scorpio-hater. Maybe the protagonist isn’t an extension of Alice herself, even though they both have two siblings and a dog; he’s just a character she thought would be fun to write.

On a larger scale, it’s how we get “author swears this story wasn’t supposed to be a Christian metaphor, stop acting like ‘it’s a Christian metaphor’ is the gospel truth.” I get that embracing death of the author results in this type of misinterpretation. It’d just be nice if people were more upfront about it being, well, An Interpretation. “Death of the author, Bob is a dog person” comes across differently than “Bob is a dog person because the author hates cats and if you read between the lines you can see how Bob’s love for his cat is just repressed and redirected dog love,” y’feel? They’re both glaringly… Not Canon, no matter how you look at it, but the version shooting the author in the face is at least acknowledging it.

Anyway, I think in a… subculture? of sorts? where it’s normal to put out bare bones character concepts, and where development relies on interaction, it’s getting harder to separate budding stories from the people who make them. If it’s not directly encouraged by the writer (see: Sad Bob), it’s a side effect of seeing the bonus features before the movie. Who needs story confirmation when you can just ask, “hey, does Bob hate Scorpios?” Aren’t author Q&As just as canon as the actual story?

Now, obviously, you can jump right into a webcomic or story or whatever and pay absolutely zero attention to the author’s social media. You don’t need to follow on twitter or wherever for updates if you check in manually. No need to look at anything beyond the story itself; the rest probably isn’t being shoved in your face. (Actually, come to think of it, webcomics kinda do via guest comics/QnAs/the very site layout, but that’s—you guessed it—another topic for another time.) I don’t wanna catastrophize here about ~the end of death of the author~, especially since “people answering OC ask memes” is a far, far cry from, y’know, actual published storytelling.

I’m just… increasingly fascinated by, and a little wary of, how different this is from the way I’ve been taught to (and still prefer to, really) approach storytelling. I’ve tried it, and it’s fun. But at the same time, I feel like my job as a writer begins and ends at just telling the damn story, and beyond that? I’m thinking hands-off is the way to go.

Sometimes you just gotta let the characters speak for themselves.