Characters: The Forgotten

Writing a first draft is always fun; in a recent conversation with Lee Child, he told me that he loved starting a first draft because he hadn’t screwed anything up yet—the book might still be great! While most writers put pressure on ourselves to get it right the first time, first drafts offer a lot of flexibility. Whatever doesn’t work you can revise, remove, or replace, after all, and no one ever has to see your tortured, confused, meandering first effort, unless, of course, you become incredibly famous, at which point you won’t mind showing off your genius process for writing novels.

But first drafts can also get a little messy. I generally produce pretty clean first drafts; if things go off the rails in a first draft for me, I usually don’t even finish the attempt, and if I finish the draft revision is generally just cleanup. As clean as my drafts usually are I still sometimes get into trouble, most frequently with that dreaded writing boogie man, the forgotten character.

Who Were You, Again?

This happened to me very recently. I started a new novel, and seeded in five main characters connected in a group. At around the 30,000 word mark, I suddenly had a realization: I hadn’t mentioned one of those five characters in several chapters. This meant that for weeks of work time, I’d completely forgotten that this character is in the novel.

Now, this can be a sign that your character shouldn’t be in the novel. After all, if you, the creator and miniature god of your fictional universe, can’t keep a character in your head, there’s probably a reason. I wrote an article for Writer’s Digest (“Kill Your Darlings”) about dealing with characters who might not need to be there, and one technique I mentioned is combining characters, which might be just what this book needs.

On the other hand, the characters are in a group, and I worry that thinning that group down too much might make it less believable. So, for the moment, I’ve decided to keep the character in there by the simple expedient of mentioning his name every now and then and giving him meaningless dialog to chime in with. This way, he’s still there, and if I find a use for him later, great! And if I don’t, I can eliminate him secure in the knowledge that he has no purpose anyway.

Of course what I really should be worried about are the real people in my life that no one else seems to see or hear. But that can wait until this book is done.