ORNAMENT OF MY MIGHT: YEAH, SURE
I like thinking up occupational equivalences to plug into The Idea I Probably Hate Most In The World, which is when authors say that their stories “write themselves” or that their characters “have their own agency.”
Carpenter: Sometimes, I sit down to build a kitchen, and before I know it, I’ve somehow built a library!
Doctor: That angioplasty just kinda did it’s own thing, you know?
Cab Driver: These new taxis drive themselves.
I, too, cringe whenever an author says their characters escaped their control and wrote their own story. It’s too cute and too simple. There is a thing that happens when you stop dictating the events of the story and instead let the plot arise out of the characters that you’ve created — everything gets easier. But it isn’t mystical and it isn’t even very special among writers. It’s called doing your job well.
There’s a temptation among writers to portray themselves as oracles. I guess it comes partly out of vanity, and partly out of a genuine puzzlement over where they get their inspiration, and why they’re the ones who get it. And partly out of a fear that someone will eventually point at them and say, “You’re just making shit up, aren’t you?” So they want to create an aura of mysticism around themselves, as if the work of writing is so mysterious no one ought to try to explain it. It’s easier for readers to suspend their disbelief if they think the writer knows things they don’t. And it’s easier for writers to make shit up when they forget that they are entirely earthly and not at all divine. I think that’s why writers say insipid things like “my characters have their own agency.” They’re trying to remove themselves from the process, to convince you, as they are convinced, that their work is inspired. (And that you should buy it.)
I can’t blame them. Writing is the same as all other work in that there’s an art to everything. But it’s different in that you can never prove you’re qualified to do it. The skills of a carpenter, a doctor, and a taxi-driver are observable and measurable. The skills of a writer are entirely objective. They change as the writer changes, as the times change, as individual readers change. No writer ever reaches a point where they’re safe from any given person reading their book and saying, “Nope, I just don’t believe that.” So they create their own authority — they are the gods to whom their characters are subject. If their characters begin to disobey, then they’ve accomplished their goal: they’ve created something truly human. It’s a calculated perversion of what really happens during the writing process, kind of a creation myth that lets writers give themselves the kind of status they need in order to ask for their readers’ time and attention.
Now that I think about it, I’m not sure there actually are less stupid-sounding means to reach the same end. In fact, it might only sound stupid if you’ve figured out for yourself that it isn’t really like that.
