The Crowd in My Head—M.G. Sondraal

Anyone who reads my blog posts or comments knows I’m closer to a plotter than a pantser though I’m not locked into rigid outlines of when events “should” happen if slavishly following the genre expectation. Benjamin Stevenson in his book, Everyone on This Train is a Suspect, skewers that notion of first death by page x, second death by page y, number of times the killer is mentioned, and other rules in his asides to the reader throughout his novel and I was gleeful admiring his irreverence to convention.

I don’t plot details. I only have a brief outline of the events in a seemingly logical sequence before my fingers touch the keyboard. For mysteries, I know the crime and how it was committed and who the guilty party is. (In the one instance when I’d not decided who the villain was until near the conclusion, I hated the ending and re-wrote a huge chunk of the book after ruminating for a year on how to fix it. Not very productive, to my mind. Lesson learned.) I hate to write scenes that go nowhere or box me in with no logical way to connect them back to the main plot line. When editing, I axe scenes that don’t provide enough forward momentum to warrant anything but a place in the graveyard of the overwritten and unnecessary. And that is all inadvertent. I certainly don’t want to waste my time doing it deliberately having lost the plot.

Though I outline events, my stories are not plot-driven. The character always comes first. I spend time thinking about characters, understanding their motivations, and creating a backstory that explains their flaws and actions. I know how my characters will react in any scenario, including secondary characters who may get a starring role in another work later. There’s a great crowd of them in my head, many without a connected story. I do this for months before I’m prepared to write anything, just casually thinking about characters as I walk, drive, or cook dinner. For each new plot, I select from this collection of fully developed characters.

I’ve never understood writers who say their characters “won’t do what I want them to do”. I’ve only ever had characters who react as I believe they would, based on their backstory and how they developed as individuals. All behaviour has meaning, and the behaviour of each character is explained by their perception of threat or safety, and the tools, or lack, that they possess to cope. Characters may not have done what the reader expects, but they should be true to their underlying nature, even if it is not yet revealed in the story or the series.

It’s not that my characters haven’t led the way to different events from those planned in my outline. If I ask “what if” enough times, the characters predicted behaviours will set the story on a meandering path, but I keep the end of the tale anchored firmly. It adds richness and complexity but should still edge me toward the same conclusion.

I don’t assign my characters a physical appearance. We can assume much from their preferred activities, but they never look in a mirror and describe themselves, nor look at one another and ponder eye colour and hair style. I occasionally mention clothing with respect to weather preparedness. Skin colour or ethnicity is not identified, though names can give you a clue (often misleading). We are all shades of brown anyway and our North American society is multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-racial. I want the reader to imagine the character without those restrictions. I know how they look to me but feel no compulsion to share that with the reader and I don’t think leaving it to their imagination negatively impacts my stories, though I know for some series, the description of the protagonist is defining for the character.  

Anyway, this is how my stories start. What’s important for you?