Category: Advice

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Killing your characters

J.K. Rowling on Twitter:

“It’s the 16th anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts. I’m having a moment’s silence over my keyboard. I hated killing some of those people.”

There was an article where the writer said “You guys! Despite cavalierly killing Lupin, Tonks, Fred Weasley, Colin Creevey, Lavender Brown, Severus Snape and dozens more, she does have feelings!”

SO wrong. Rowling didn’t cavalierly kill those characters; characters she had spend years developing. But there couldn’t be a Battle of Hogwarts where only the bad guys died. The stakes at the. Battle of Hogwarts were high. For none of the good guys to die would have been shallow, artificial, and unconvincing.

Fair warning to you: I’m writing. I will write characters I hope you like, and then bad things will happen to some of them. I won’t want bad things to happen to them, but if you know some of the characters are the author’s little darlings, living charmed lives, there goes the suspense, the drama. It might still be interesting, but it won’t be as deeply engaging as it could be.

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Eggsperiment

Do you know what happens when you microwave a peeled, nearly hard boiled egg at full power for five seconds?

Not much. It barely gets warm.

Do you know what happens when you microwave a peeled, nearly hard boiled egg at full power for ten seconds?

It gets a little warmer.

Do you know what happens when you microwave a peeled, nearly hard boiled egg at full power for 15 seconds?

It gets warmer yet.

Do you know what happens when you microwave a peeled, nearly hard boiled egg at full power for 22 seconds?

It gets hot.

Do you know what happens when you microwave a peeled, nearly hard boiled egg at full power for 28 seconds?

It explodes.

Do you know how long it takes to clean a microwave in which you have exploded a peeled, nearly hard boiled egg?

Fifteen minutes.

You might ask, why would you microwave a peeled, nearly hard boiled egg? Because it was nearly hard boiled. There was kind of a divot in it after I peeled it, and I could see a bit of the yolk, and it didn’t look quite cooked.

I looked at the nearly hardboiled egg, and I thought, aha! I can fix this! I’ll just microwave it! Not too long, though, or it might explode.

So I started microwaving the nearly hard boiled egg, a couple seconds at a time. Due to phase change, the temperature curve may not have been a linear response to linear input, though.

I felt like Scotty when I did it.

Captain Kirk: More power, Scotty!
Me: She’ll nae take it, Captain! She’s going to blow!

It did.

Or it was like Chris Knight in Real Genius. All I had to do is synthesize the excited bromide in its frozen state in an argon matrix, and then apply a field to radiatively couple it to the ground state to yield a gigajoule of energy output per liter!

Or, in this case, a completely cooked egg yolk.

No, seriously! There was phase change when the yolk went from semi-liquid to solid. It must have been. The egg didn’t explode because I was stupid and this was the predictable result of microwaving the egg!

Right?

In my defense, it does appear that the egg yolk was, in fact, completely cooked at the time it exploded.

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Say a Holy Yes

A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp’s half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writer’s task to say, ‘It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a café when you can eat macrobiotic at home.’ Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist – the real truth of who we are.

~ Natalie Goldberg