December 6, 2024
(This letter contains minor spoilers from my current project. Although I don’t think it will change your experience if you ever read it, you’ve been warned)
In the novel I've been working on for the past two years, when we are first introduced to one of the characters, we learn he has recently cheated on his wife. In the original ending, she forgives him.
When I found out my husband had been carrying on an affair, again, for years, a great many things had to change, including, I felt, the ending for these two characters.
There were only a few elements of my truth in their storyline when I began writing it. Although they didn’t fully reflect my own narrative, the husband was in the Air Force, and in the original ending, the wife stayed. That’s about all we had in common. But when I found my way back to this book after I left my spouse, now that my own ending was going to be different, I couldn’t keep that ending for the wife. I knew what it was like to stay, and I really struggled to impose that even on a minor character in a fictional book. I could no longer give them the ending I had planned for them.
In Write Away: One Novelist's Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life, Elizabeth George warns the risk of overly autobiographical characters— “The problem with basing characters on yourself... is that you know yourself too well and at the same time not well enough. This can create a flatness in the character because you unconsciously protect yourself from self-criticism.”
I have read many manuscripts where I’ve asked my clients in my reflection letter if a character is based on them. And when they ask how I knew, I must admit it is because that character is the flattest and least interesting.
I know that I shouldn’t put too much of my own story in my characters…
But then, writers like Twain said, write what you know.
So, what do I do with these characters? I contemplated removing him completely from the book. I asked myself was he even necessary? If I remove him from the book, the wife never gets cheated on and doesn't have to decide to stay or go. But then I thought about all the scenes he was in. The loose cannon the other characters would be without his grounding. He is needed in the book…but I am angrier at him now and it effects my writing—angrier than when I created him from a place of sympathy and forgiveness. So, what do I do?
I want to believe I am not the only one who has ever let personal emotions influence creative decisions. I can't be the only one who has ever questioned if allowing something to happen in a book somehow grants approval in real life.
Has this ever happened to you? Did you change your book to fit your life? Did you give a character the ending you didn’t have? Did you save your characters from themselves?
For now, I’ve decided to keep him in the novel. But I have changed the ending to be ambiguous. For now, I will give the reader the chance to decide what becomes of them. I must give the wife the chance to make her own choices even though I desperately want her to leave.
