Love Letters
Kate Elliott September 2nd, 2006
Many – most – maybe even all of us here at Deep Genre write character-driven fiction (I qualify that statement only because while I would like to presume to speak for the others, I can’t quite).
For myself, I can say that every one of my novels has its genesis in a vivid, visual, scene of a Character in a Situation. The landscape and the plot grow out of that original image and emotional tone.
Sometimes characters emerge organically out of the evolving narrative, sometimes they walk in from my unconscious and hit me over the head demanding to be included, and sometimes I will “build†a character who is needed due to the exigencies of the plot. In general, though, characters are who they are; in a perfect world, they are discrete individuals whose lives are intertwined with the landscape they “live†in.
Some among us now and then may invest a character with a bit of wish fulfillment. I’m not immune to this urge, and at times I indulge it cautiously and with (I hope) restraint. At the extreme, this is called writing a “Mary Sue†story, a subject that has been discussed earlier on Deep Genre here and here by Sherwood.
But there’s another kind of personalized character development that I want to call “The Love Letter.â€
Continue Reading »