Baggage

A student wrote to me today with an interesting problem, one that I see a lot. Her story is about a character who is dealing with some important issues that the writer is interested in putting into a novel. Yet the character won't seem to come alive and dramatize those in the way the author wants her to.

This points to something I think of as a character's "baggage." Not in the sense of the character having problems, but in the sense that there are suitcases and backpacks they've been instructed to carry by the writer. We all have characters like this; so often they're our protagonists. "Enact the story of my grandmother's life," we tell them, or "help people understand that war is evil." The weightier these burdens are, the more they slow down your character. 

It's difficult to let these things go. Sometimes they're the reason we (thought we) started the story in the first place. But sometimes they're the very things we have to let the characters drop so they can move through the story and have their adventures, instead of trudging, head down, from the beginning to the end, dragging a 75-pound wheelie bag that actually belongs to someone else: the author. 

The interesting thing is, once you do allow your character to let go of those, they often do the thing you wanted them to do anyway. Just not in the way your conscious mind was expecting. 

But regardless of whether they do or don't, if you let them drop your baggage, they will find out what their own destiny is, and they will come alive. And that, more than anything we impose on them, is what makes a good story.