“I think about the characters I’ve created, and then I sit down and start typing and see what they will do. There’s a lot of subconscious thought that goes on. It amazes me to find out, a few chapters later, why I put someone in a certain place when I did.” - Tom Clancy
I thought of Clancy’s quote today
while working on my newest novel and realizing that the characters I was
working with had done their job quite nicely without that much extra
effort by me. I know this is a
phenomenon that affects most writers of fiction, but it’s still always a
surprise when the words, actions and places in which they are happening connect.
Writers get immersed in
the lives of their fictional characters while doing the actual writing. But they tend to find that the activities and
actions of the people in their real lives also are creating ongoing ideas and
situations that might become the next segments within those stories they are
telling.
It’s this merging of the real world
with the fictional one that makes a writer’s life both interesting and
exasperating.
“My characters are fictional,”
said S.E. Hinton when talking about the process. “But I get ideas from real people.”
Tom Clancy S.E.
Hinton
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