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Writer's pictureMark Sanders

Free Will vs. Determinism

Are we as writers gods, or do our characters possess a life and a will of their own?

I put my manuscript for "Dylan's Treasure" in a drawer in the early part of 1995, a few months before I met Amy, who I would marry later that year. The adjustment of being married and becoming a father for the first time, in addition to a series of jobs that left me overworked and underpaid, were all obstacles that seemed insurmountable to my future as a writer. As a single man, I had always worked late into the night with my stories, but as a husband with a wife to share a bed with, I didn't want to stay up alone. In addition, the sheer mental exhaustion of each day left me feeling like even a sentence or two was asking too much.


But after a few years, that old itch started to return. I found my completed pages printed out in a desk drawer, and I started to read them. That vivid description I had sought to create ignited my imagination once again, and I began to ruminate about what would happen next. First things first, however...when to write?


There was only one choice. Days were too busy, and nights left me with nothing in the tank, so I set my alarm in the morning to awaken one hour before Amy and the kids, about 5:45 a.m. This would be my writing hour. I had little previous experience of morning writing, so I figured I would feel brain-dead through the attempt.


Quite the contrary, once a little light and a cup of coffee cleared the cobwebs, I found the fresh mind flowed with ideas previously undiscovered. I had uninterrupted time each day to compose the next scene, and I quickly went from 30-40 pages to double that, and eventually exceeded more than 100 pages. I completed the rest of the novel's first draft in six months. The lesson: if you want to finish the story bad enough, there is always the time, place, and means to do so.


But my biggest obstacle to completing the book was my own role as its author. Inexperienced with completing a novel, I focused on the plot and how I could accomplish the outlined goal of most romances—man meets woman, man loses woman through stupidity, woman takes man back in spite of previous stupidity. I thought I had a breakthrough idea one day on the way back to Poplar Bluff (my home) from St. Louis. In fact, I was so into my thoughts that I missed my exit on the Interstate and had to circle around!


I thought at that time that I had put all my characters into ideal places with infallible actions, like a master chess player who sees 15 moves ahead how he will win the game. I wrote it all down as if it were one of the Pentagon's strategies for military victory. Ha ha ha! There was only one problem, however. The more I wrote, the more these characters not only came to life in my imagination, but they also took on a life of their own. As I wrote, I felt more like a reporter recording observed actions and conversations and less like a god creating and controlling a world of my design.


Then the crisis: I came to the point where my exit-missing idea had to be implemented to speed the story along to its conclusion. The problem was that by this time, my three main characters—Dylan, Siannon, and Kane—couldn't behave that way because if they were real people (and by this time, they were real to me), they never would behave in the way I had planned weeks before. My plan was out of character and would seem artificial and contrived to my potential readers. It was the kind of thing for which I would walk out of a movie had I witnessed this act committed by another artist.


What was I going to do? I didn't have an alternate plan, and I didn't know what was going to happen to get to the conclusion I wanted (a conclusion I always wanted and am still overjoyed with years later). The solution was simple. Keep doing what I was doing that caused my plot to crash in the first place: be a reporter, not a creator. I knew who they were, and I knew what they would do from this point, so I let them do it. I simply wrote down what I saw. And this is the core of what you read in the final third of the novel. Almost none of it was planned ahead of time; it happened as I wrote it. Most of it surprised me to the point that I wondered where it all came from.


So, are we writers gods or reporters? I think we start out as Deist gods, creators of worlds and the laws of physics (including magic and religion) that govern those realms, who then walk off the stage and let the play develop of its own accord. As writers, we are the deities who give birth to characters and creatures who act within the framework of our will but who exhibit an ever-growing sense of independence and freedom the more we observe them on the journeys that we set them upon. I often wonder if the power who created us gave us this ability as a reflection of our own reality—beings exercising our own freedom within the framework of the will and the world of that power's creation.

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