Creating the Future

Is it possible to create the future, as we create stories and characters for our own worlds of fiction?

And we do create it for them.

It’s a strange kind of power to have, a odd kind of control over the lives of characters who start with us, grow from us, separate themselves from us as they evolve and change into real people.

And yet we still have the power to affect their future.

We put them into situations and scenarios that can quite easily kill them, especially when writing inside the crime fiction genre.

What they do when we throw them in determines whether or not they live or die, and how much longer they have within that fictional world.

If they do not die as they are supposed to do, it can mean making the killer stronger than perhaps we had first planned on.

A robotic kind of killer, almost, without feeling or human emotion.

Someone who would happily chop up people just for the sake of it, or for their own twisted ends, their own justifications.

Then, of course, you must have a hero who can defeat such a villain.

But in terms of the characters who end up dead, just how weak do you have to make them in order for them to be drawn into the monster’s lair?

How stupid do they have to be to go where others with any instinct or intuition would never dream of going?

It seems insulting to create such characters, in order for them to serve such a purpose within the realms of the fictional world they are destined to die in.

But that’s the trouble with destiny.

You can’t change it.

And our characters mostly can’t, or the whole story about a serial killer kidnapping and killing people would be non-existent if the victims were all strong enough to fight back and live.

It would defeat the story before it got going.

But if you make them too weak, there’s always the danger that their death will not be viewed with anything other than contempt.

I do it myself.

Not kill people, you understand.

Well, none that I would willingly admit to.

No, if I’m reading or watching any crime story, I’m so often telling them not to go somewhere that looks or seems dangerous, because I know they will end up dead.

I suppose it engages me in the story when I find myself scratching my head at their stupidity, or actively shouting at the television screen, then looking away at their inevitable demise.

But it doesn’t have to be so inevitable.

Better to be surprised, to build the suspense on a character we think is for the chop, then turn it around and make it someone else, or better yet make them the killer.

Hmm perhaps I should keep that idea to myself.

We can all see the future for certain characters, and write them the future that we have judged they deserve.

Sometimes they can surprise us - they can live through sheer force of will when we have planned their death.

A character in my recent book was destined for the chop, yet found the strength within to not only fight and save their own life, but actually came out of the situation with themselves still in tact.

Mostly.

I mean, physically they had taken quite the torturous beating, but mentally they had come through so much better than even I could have predicted.

It was a nice surprise, and now I’m looking forward to where I can take that character next.

They have a future I had not planned for.

One to be revealed in time.

As do most of us.

Reading over old work the other day I realised the life I had planned for myself was not the one I was apparently destined for.

I saw through the words I had written so many years ago, and understood at once the path I had set myself on.

It made me wonder just how long I would have to leave current works in order to see the truth inside them, to see the layer beneath the surface.

And wonder if whether finally seeing the truth means that I will accept that truth when it is presented before my eyes.

Is it wrong to hope for a better future, even when the present shows you that the future you want is but a dream?

Even if those around you are doubtful of its realistic chances?

How many naysayers does it take to make the dream only a delusion?

In short, is it possible to create a future for yourself purely through force of will, to make it come into being like the characters do inside their own world?

I suppose only time will tell.

The over-riding character elements have to include not only the force of will necessary to push in the direction of that dream, and the belief that your dream is not just a delusion, but to have the essence of truth inside.

Every character who has ever surprised me within their world has not once stepped out of character to do it.

The element they needed was always there, it just required the spark to light it up, and the insistence to keep it alight.

So the question becomes, in your darkest most doubtful moments, what truth do you see when you look inside your dream?

If like me, however, you are plagued with constant doubts and fears, it becomes harder to separate truth from fantasy.

So what do you do?

Keep the flame alight and hope that everything works out for the best, works out the way it is supposed to?

I wish I knew.

Still, as a writer I am lucky.

I can explore these ideas through my writing to my heart’s content.

They say that writers often write about what is lacking in their lives, and I can see now how true that is.  That, and writing from experience, usually the most effective way of understanding how something really feels.

How else do writers of romantic sub-plots within crime fiction so effectively capture the yearning of someone who cannot be with the one they love?

It’s one thing to write from a place of imagination, to wonder what it would be like if you had to wait what feels like a lifetime in order to meet the one person with whom you would spend the rest of your life.

Or to imagine how it might feel to meet that person, and then be unable to be with them, the source of many a crime novel and crime of passion.

It’s quite another to have to do it.

And fortunately, or unfortunately, we all have experience of being hurt by love.

But not as many have experiences of crime.  Or do they?

It makes me wonder how many crime writers have actually experienced crime, on the right or the wrong side of it.

Perhaps we all do, and that is why we write about it.

Perhaps we have none at all, and like to imagine what we would do if there were no rules and we could do as we liked.

It’s probably a mixture of both, a little experience with a lot of imagination.

Which side was it for me?

I’ll never tell.