Question No. 3 is: I read an interview with an author who says that, at a certain point in writing a novel, the characters “take over” and tell him what to do. Does this happen to you, too?
This one always raises my blood pressure. Nobody ever answered it better than Nabokov did in his Paris Review interview, where he fingered EM Forster as the source of the myth about a novelist’s characters “taking over”, and claimed that, unlike Forster, who let his characters sail away on their passage to India, he himself worked his characters “like galley slaves”. The question obviously raised Nabokov’s blood pressure, too.
When a writer makes a claim like Forster’s, the best-case scenario is that he’s mistaken. More often, unfortunately, I catch a whiff of self-aggrandisement, as if the writer were trying to distance his work from the mechanistic plotting of genre novels. The writer would like us to believe that, unlike those hacks who can tell you in advance how their books are going to end, hisimagination is so powerful, and his characters so real and vivid, that he has no control over them. The best case here, again, is that it isn’t true, because the notion presupposes a loss of authorial will, an abdication of intent. The novelist’s primary responsibility is to create meaning, and if you could somehow leave this job to your characters you would necessarily be avoiding it yourself.
