So my character got arrested today, and he’s none too pleased. I tried to let him know that this was coming and I put it off for as long as I could. Because seriously. If you’re a character in Victorian London and you get arrested (for whatever reason), where are they going to take you? Why, Newgate Prison, of course!
So there’s two, no, wait, three problems. First, my character, who’s basically an upstanding guy, doesn’t want to go. The place gives him the creeps and he’s all sorts of bad memories associated with it, and simply, he’s kicking and hollering about it, right about now.
Second, I’ll never get it right. I could look at pictures and drawings of Newgate Prison forever, and really, thanks to the internet for all that time I’ll never get back. And thanks to London for tearing the building down in the first place! I’m sure it was a pure, unmitigated hell hole, but oh, my god, the history that disappeared with each torn-down brick. I’m waiting for the holodeck to be invented, or the time machine, so I can go back and do a proper job of taking notes. You can’t take notes on a building that simply is no longer there! (I’ve got my imagination yes, but I do like having notes on something more visceral.)
And third, is that little voice in the back of my head that chides me for letting my characters have a say at all. Because they’re not real, right? Right? Wrong.
I once had a boss who asked me where I was going on vacation. I told her that I was going with a friend to Charleston.
And then she asked, well, “Why Charleston?”
And I said, “Well, I’m particularly keen to see the history there and to visit The Battery, which was where Rhett Butler bought his mother a house after the war.” I mean, I said it just like that, it came out, and I guess I just expected her to keep up with me.
But what she had to say, with her face all squidged up, was, “Rhett Butler?”
So I said, “Yes, Rhett Butler, of the Charleston Butlers?” (Thinking to myself, how in the world can she not know who this guy is?) And then I said, “You Rhett Butler from Gone With the Wind?”
And then, after a pause, she said, “You do know that Rhett Butler isn’t a real person, right?”
And I say…well, I wish I’d said something ratty like, “Yes, he is and and so’s your old man!” or something equally witty. But I think I felt caught out and hung to dry, so I said, ha ha, “Of course I do!”
But I didn’t. And I never will. When a writer makes a character live and breathe for me like that? The character lives and breathes forever. And I’d be willing to think, in spite of Timothy Dalton, that Rhett might go back and marry Scarlett one day. That is, if she ever figures it out. Which she won’t, and I know she won’t, and that’s because she lives and breathes on her own, too.
And my character breathes. He’s pretty brave, and some bad stuff has happened to him, but the worst is yet to come. I’ve figured out something about what I like to write about, and it spells trouble for everyone in the book. So, I’ve been sidling up to it these last few days, trying to sneak up on my characters, particularly “O,” but he’s a smart guy and he already knows it’s coming.
So because he already knew, the arrest scene got kind of melodramatic, in the hand-to-forehead-oh-no-I’m-in-Newgate kind of way, but I’m going to let it sit there, and just move on like the scene worked out properly, even though it didn’t. I find that this helps sometimes, just to write it and let it lay there, flopping. And then I’ll write another scene, further down the timeline and the characters, oddly enough, will refer to something that happened in the flopping-around scene that I didn’t even know about. And I’m like did that really happen? I don’t remember writing that. And they go, Yes, it did, so just right it down, will you? It happens all the time for me, luckily.
I know all writers have their quirks, but I’m wondering if any of them have characters that are so opinionated and mouthy as mine. (And I think “O” is terribly afraid that the ordeal in the following graphic will happen to him. It won’t. It’ll be worse.)
