Robert_Hart
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On creating characters and worlds
🕑 Added 2020-05-12 06:43:59 +0000 UTC
A reader has suggested to me that there was something not quite right with Will’s character – and this, as you might imagine, is a difficult thing for an author to hear about any character, let alone the protagonist of a story. But it is important to recognise that, from their perspective, they are right: that is the way this reader understands Will. Fortunately, in conversation last year with an author I respect deeply, I was reminded that every reader brings themselves to a story: in effect, everyone reads a different version of Through my Eyes. Again. and an author has no control over those versions. To my friend, this is one of the delights of writing although to a novice writer like myself, that feels, well, a bit unsettling. It is as if I drop a pebble in the water, creating a specific set of ripples, but they then interact in unexpected ways with the objects the ripples encounter. I understand the Physics of waves well but there is a strange metaphysics occurring when those ripples are a story and the objects it interacts with are people and their imaginations.
This ‘everybody has their own version’ is an issue I am slowly coming to terms with as readers send me their comments. There is an instinctive desire to write back “Yes, but…” and, so far, this has been constrained.
In addition to having a weird composite protagonist, Through my Eyes. Again. also plays with history. Its world starts out close to the one we live in, but there are differences. Small ones that Will recognises quite quickly but then larger ones. Will knows almost immediately that the world he has arrived in is different but he has no idea if those differences are small and insignificant or, perhaps, they have a domino effect cascading into big and possibly dangerous changes. Some of the differences Will recognises – but there are others he does not. Playing with alternate history is fun but quite dangerous as history is a complex of intertwining threads and readers bring their own interpretation of the specific ‘what ifs’ involved. By the end of Through my Eyes. Again. the world Will has fallen into is very different to the one he previously lived through.
It is my hope that this different world is believable – in the sense of the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ necessary for all stories.
