Your Writer's Block Will Vanish When You Do This...

When You Let Your Characters Be

A note by JA Boman gave me a new take on the world a character inhabits and how it’s built.

It’s similar to how I think game design is.

You create a world for the character to move through and accomplish goals that are in harmony with game dynamics.

The world can be vastly constructed and detailed but the character only sees a part of this world on their gaming journey.

That’s how we move through life. Consider your last visit to New York City. You read about how there’s eight million people at any given time, along with many other facts about it. But when you go there and walk through the most crowded of streets, how many people do you see? A few hundred? Maybe a thousand? It would take many visits to cover every square mile of the boroughs that make up the totality of New York City.

Likewise with a game. The first one is basic in its world building. If it’s commercially successful, then it get sequels with new worlds, new levels and hidden challenges to explore and collect stuff.

Grand Theft Auto started as a compressed pseudo-Los Angeles, but each new version of the game expands on this place.

The GTA series started as a concentrated set of LA locations and the commercial success earned the makers of the game the means to expand their universe. I love that the creators of this series called themselves Rockstar Games.

This is very similar to character-driven writing.

I consider myself a character-driven writer.

I start with a character, motivation, and something happening to which the protagonist reacts.

The world in which the character moves through presents itself and expands as the story unfolds.

That is, as the protagonist makes decisions and takes action.

His reality is being constructed by his own mind.

With the author as the source of inspiration.

This is not something I learned right away. After a few stories and screenplays I was suddenly struck by this writing method I had come to without meaning to.

I remember writing short stories, plotting ahead of the writing, and then during the actual writing, I'd notice myself drifting away from what I’d plotted to unexpected places. Not knowing any better, I would force things back to what I had plotted. It was difficult work, because I’d find myself rewriting things constantly, and when I finished I didn’t feel good about what I’d written. After a couple of stories written in this way, I stopped to think things over.

I wasn’t enjoying the process.

I was bursting with ideas, lines of dialogue, awesome scenes, but I was dreading getting started.

Then I asked myself: what if I stopped resisting? What if I just go with where the character was taking things?

So if you’re stuck in your writing, let go.

Stop trying to control things and see where your characters take things.

The writing process got a lot smoother after I did that. After I let the characters have their agency and let their journey and their private world unfold to their desires and goals.

And here is an example of my latest short fiction writing.