Character as algorithm

 

If you’re a writer, you’re familiar with this phenomenon: a character takes on a life of their own, dictating to you what they will and won’t say, will and won’t do. What the hell, you say. I brought you into this novel world, and I can take you out of it.

Well, yes—but that’s your only choice if a character gets uppity. Kill off the character, or delete them. You cannot discipline them.

Why is that? Why can’t you do whatever you want with a character?

Because a character is essentially a set of rules you’ve created. An algorithm, to use a despised word. A series of nested if…then statements that guide the character’s actions.

Take my old friend Sherlock Holmes, for instance. Here is rule number one of the Holmesian canon: Holmes solves puzzles. 

Corollary: he solves them with his mind, not his fists. 

(This is indeed the wall between Holmes and hard-boiled detectives like Philip Marlowe, whose number one directive as outlined by his creator, Raymond Chandler is “when in doubt, have somebody pull a gun.”)

This is not to say that Holmes never gets physical, never carries a gun. We all know that he’s lethal at single stick and baritsu. But in the canon, fisticuffs rarely come into play. It’s significant that the only person killed at Holmes’s hands is Moriarty.

So when we see a pastiche like Guy Ritchie’s Young Sherlock series, the question is “Yes, it may be entertaining, but is it Holmes?” 

And we judge it not by whether Sherlock sprouts a whole family or adopts James Moriarty as his (far more charismatic) sidekick, but “is this a story about solving puzzles with his mind or his fists?” And since Guy Ritchie is a master at action scenes but woefully deficient at understatement, most Holmes purists are inclined to give this series a pass.

I’ll give you another, more personal example. I’m working on a novel that might be called a locked room mystery in reverse. It concerns a group of servants in an English country manor trying to solve a series of murders that are taking place upstairs. But the servant’s are confined to their own dining hall downstairs—which is only one of the obstacles they face. 

Since the action is largely confined to one room (in one night), I felt the need to add a dash of excitement somewhere by having a fight break out between two of the characters. I didn’t know exactly when, but it would be after their animosity had simmered and heated to a boiling point.

So I gave a stab at writing it. And: couldn’t do it. The characters wouldn’t allow it. They would not fight, not physically.

Why? 

I had established early on that these were English manor house servants: bland, self-effacing, efficient, striving to be invisible.  Think Stevens in The Remains of the Day. There simply was no way on earth that these two would lower themselves to a physical altercation, especially in front of their fellow servants who operated by the same algorithm.

So if I wanted to spice things up for the reader, I was going to have to take an alternate route. I was going to have pick the lock, to travel inside my character’s heads:

Oh, in Charles’s imagination it played out very differently. Philip had tried to lay hands on him. Charles had tossed him off, giving him a single slap across the face for good measure. He hadn’t put all his strength into it, but the mark would burn for days. But Philip, in a fit of madness, had come at him again. He had to be taught a lesson. Charles had smashed his stupid face with his fists—right, left, left right. Perhaps he had lost his self-control, just a bit. That’s what happened when the red mist came over his eyes. By the time had finished, Philip’s face was like a slab of raw meat. That was an exercise in discipline that he had no choice but to effect.

He was exhausted just thinking about it.

As for Philip? He was more saturnine than sanguinary. His blood was up, yes, but he wasn’t one to indulge in romantic fantasy. His pulse was singing, his breath shallow, but his mind was a clear-running stream. He would not be baited. For a moment, he conjured a world without Charles, without any Charleses, and he found it good.

Every character is a series of nested choices which define them. Not your choices, their choices. Sure as searing a steak seals in the juices, a character is sealed by the way they react to outside pressure. If you follow the algorithm, the character will be tasty when you slice into them.