DIARY OF A FIRST NOVELIST: When Characters Die

Some of the most gratifying e-mail messages I’ve gotten about my debut novel have been from readers who contacted me to complain. A gratifying complaint? Sounds like an oxymoron, and usually for me, it is. Like most writers, I tend to get a little prickly about criticism--even when I ask for it.

Usually when I show a manuscript to a trusted friend or to my agent, it goes like this: “Go ahead; tell me the truth," I say glibly. "Clobber me  with it.” Then, when they do, I'm devastated. See,  what I’m really hoping is that my early readers will come back glowing and say it’s absolutely perfect. In fact, I’m the next Proust--only more delectably readable.

However, once I get over the requisite  day of brooding, I usually realize that many--okay, most of their criticisms--have merit. Then, I set about using them to make both the work--and myself as a writer-- stronger.

So why have I found myself nodding wistfully at the computer when I’ve received e-mails from readers that challenged and questioned in the last week? Because these readers didn’t contact me to complain about the quality of the work. No, their issue was with the fate of  the troublesome lot I used to call “my characters”.

That is how I’ve thought of them in the long relationship we developed while I was writing their stories. But as the responses from readers have made clear, Ali and Jeanne, George and Jamie and Gavin, the dangerously flawed and  completely real people, who troubled my dreams for so long, no longer belong to me.

As mysteriously as they once sauntered into my writing room and took up their stormy residence, they have wandered off to enter the minds and hearts of others. Like the legion of fictional characters who have left their mark in any small or large way, they now belong to any reader who is willing to let them in the door and serve them tea.

Why, the readers wanted to know, did the victim have to die? Even the murderer in the story had earned their compassion. Couldn’t it have ended more mercifully for him or her? Couldn’t they have realized thefutility--the wrongness--of their actions before it was too late?

Why those questions were so gratifying to me is because they are the same ones we ask of life. And as in life, the answers remain the same: I don’t know why, but if I was to remain true to the story, it had to happen as it did.

Recently, a marvelous young writer friend named Laini Taylor-Di Bartolo
wrote a deeply affecting piece about the  demise of a beloved dog.
She wrote that it happened so quickly  it was if the dog was “out walking one day, and old age fell out of a tree and clobbered her.”

I found that particularly poignant because it describes the vulnerability--and the innocence--of our condition in life. We are out walking one day and old age, or illness, or death itself falls from a tree and clobbers us.

And though we’ve witnessed it many times, though we intellectually understand its inevitability, we are still shocked, grieved, and  confused when it strikes. We are also full of questions. Why did it have to happen? Why couldn’t it be otherwise?

If a character is real and worthwhile enough to deserve our time and emotion, he or she will prompt the same responses, perhaps even a little of the same grief when they meet their demise. When you come to think of it, isn't engaging us in the questions  what fiction, or indeed any art,  is all about?

Patry Francis, Books Correspondent:

Patry's column, Diary of a First Novelist, published every Wednesday (or in the wee hours of Thursday when she's on a deadline) to Gather Essentials: Books will detail all she knows--and is in the process of learning--about writing and publishing.  

To learn more about Patry and her debut novel, The Liar's Diary, visit her Website.

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