The Island of Misfit Characters
By Kathryn Magendie | March 10, 2018 |
Esparta Palma “I see dead dolls … Hanging like normal dolls” – Creative Commons
You know how it is, when you are doing something that doesn’t require much brain-power, your thoughts clangity-clang around. Like while showering, or washing dishes, or driving until you realize that you’ve gone five-ten miles and have no idea how you went five-ten miles completely unaware that you’d been driving—of course I never or rarely sometimes only just every so often do that driving thing. Um. Yeah.
Sixty-five percent of my errant flippity thoughts are tossed out as trash. Twenty-five percent are sucked, disappearing, into the black hole in my brain—that cavernous mysterious pitch-black waiting room that provides when it feels like providing. Two percent is what I talk about in polite conversation; twenty-three-point-three percent is what I won’t talk about in polite conversation. And lastly but not leastly fifty-two-point-five percent goes into appropriately-tabbed folders for writing, life, work, and what-a-knot. Yeah. That’s more than 100%. Welp. Let’s move on and not examine all my chaos, ‘kay?
Folders for work-related stuff. Folders for family and friends. Folders for health, food, fun. There’s the folder marked DO NOT OPEN! that I do not open but occasionally that folder is so full of gooey green gaseous putritude that out explodes the negative crapity-doo-dah-day. Imagine Pig Pen from the Charlie Brown comics but instead of dirt and dust it’s a swarm of every bad thought and decision and failure—perceived or real—that you’ve ever experienced, and each little globby stinging hornet has a big fat stinging mouth that sounds like someone Not Good For You. Dang!
Then, there is that lovely multi-colored sparkly shining dazzling Writing Folder. And it is there that I will lovingly tuck these flashes of a character. I’m sure many of us have this happen, you know, the character and a tiny scene so shiningly exceptional that you just can’t WAIT to begin what will surely be the Novel You Have Always Wanted To Write. For example, this character who so flashed in my head one fine day:
She named the child Praline, pronounced it Pray-Leen. What got his goat was how stupid a name that was. And how that name could be pronounced in two ways according to where a person lived: Pray-leen could just as well be Prah-leen, and that shot to hell her idea that the kid would have “pray” in her name, all come to Jesus-like, wherever she may go. That woman did other things to get a hold of his goat, things that sent his spine straight up and his fingers to curl into a fist, a fist he never used on her of course even when he wanted to since she was a hellfire bitch. A fist that tightened all the way up to his jaw and caused his teeth to clench and grind. His thoughts stomped on his brain as he pushed the bullets into his gun. “Me or her,” he said, “which it’s gonna be, me or her ….”
Ohhhh! Golly Gee! I was all excited about that man, and what’s he going to do with the gun? Ohhhh! And who is the hellfire-bitch, and really, what’s going to happen with Pray-Prah-Leen? Ohhhh! I rushed home from my errands, forgetting I was driving for like thirty-three miles and once home I skipped to my laptop with glee and wrote out that scene, sat back with a grin, and then something shiny caught my eye. That was about five years ago. Haha! Where’d that character with his gun go? And the woman, and Pray-Prah-Leen? In a file-folder? Nope. They went off to . . .
The Island of Misfit Characters. Where all the wayward characters go. Because they are Not Quite Right. Oh, a few have built little boats and somehow made it back to civilization where they founder and flounder and end up aimlessly in a short story or poem. But most happily stay on the island, building little communities and living their lives without me to interfere.
There’s simply no way to keep every little thought or idea tucked in a file, no matter how much we think (at the time) how perfect it will be, at the ready for a future novel that will capture the imagination of millions of readers who will love you and adore you and probably make a movie and maybe you’ll even have a cameo and be discovered for the genius you really are. There’s no way every character, every scene, every brilliant thought that explodes brilliantly into our brilliant minds can grow up to become a brilliant novel.
Eventually, we need to focus on one character or if you are a plotty-outliney kind of writer then focus on a plot or an idea. For me, the character who is the loudest, or the most persuasive, or especially the one who sneaks into my brain with some kind of interesting glitch about them that makes me want to follow them to see what they’ll do. Whatever your process is, well, that’s the one right for you. But if your process is to become overwhelmed by eighty-galleven ideas and characters and there you sit at your writing area staring at all your file folders and oh where to begin! What to write next! Which character to follow? There’s so many ideas and characters and thoughts. *pant pant pant* Maybe I’ll go make a sandwich and watch some television.
We would do well to remember that just because some characters go to the Island of Misfit Characters doesn’t mean we will come up dry. Why, gee, we could send fifty-two characters to the Island of Misfit Characters and still ten more would take their place. Or, maybe for you the numbers are inverted. But if a character is not right, they are not right, and forcing them into worlds where they don’t want to be never works. Let them have their Island. Let them go.
Imagine rowing out to the Island of Misfit Characters to take back with you a character you once dreamt up, and stepping onto that island all these characters who’d been living just fine without you are reminded about you and then they surround you and they’re clawing at you, yelling, screaming, begging, pleading, cajoling, threatening, “MEMEMEME ME! Me Next! Me Next! Write about ME ME ME! MEEEEEEE!” *Shudder;* gives me the willies. Lawdy! Nope, stay away from there. You’ll grow mad! Mad I tell you! Mad!
If we let those errant characters and scenes distract us, then how will we Actually Write The Book. We’ll be forever Starting A Book. You know, like how people say, “I have ten novels in my head!” Well, get rid of nine of them and write the one you are supposed to. And the Supposed To is what you gotta figure out by sending the wrong characters to the island and leaving them there. Oh, they don’t mind. Really! I promise. And you can always trust what a writer says for we are honest and true and considerate and kind and our mothers and besties think we rock. Then, once you set that character and idea free to the Island of Misfit Characters, you can then concentrate on the character-scene that motivates you to stick to it from beginning to end.
Would you like to share a character you thought would be in your Next Great Novel? That you then sadly and regretfully had to send off to the Island of Misfit Characters ? Write it in the comments if you want(dare).
Author, Content Editor at Edge of Arlington, and along with Angie Ledbetter, former Publishing Editor of The Rose & Thorn online journal.
Her short stories, essays, poetry, and photography have been published in print and online publications. Her novels are available in print and ebook. TENDER GRACES, Magendie’s first novel, was an Amazon Kindle Number 1 best-seller.
She lives in the Smoky Mountains in a little log home in the Cove at Killian Knob in Maggie Valley, Western North Carolina with her wonky-toothed little dog named Bear. Trees surround her. The mountains hug around her. Critters love her. Crows follow her around the Cove. Bears stare at her through her window. One day she’ll finish another novel.
Some or all of this is true.
Whew! That was some good stuff with my mernin’ cawfee! I hope you rescue PRAW-LEAN (hehe) from Misfit Island and cram her and them others into a short story. Then she has a better chance of “making it big” in a novel. xo
I’m PRAY-in, or is it PRAW-in? that you resurrect this idea. I always love a story where someone has a gun and, as they say, it has to go off.
Lawd! I ain’t going to that island – *scary place* …. NO! No no no … it’s … it’s … *shudder* ….
In the 1950s. Theodore Sturgeon famously made his observation, now called his “law,” about 90% of everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
Sixty years earlier, Rudyard Kipling wrote: “Four-fifths of everybody’s work must be bad. But the remnant is worth the trouble for its own sake.”
(Perhaps Sturgeon was less generous than Kipling, or perhaps average quality declined in the intervening years– who can say?)
Kathryn’s enjoyable post serves to reminds us that even our own ideas and our own writings aren’t exempt from these observations.
Well, yours aren’t, anyway. Mine are Kipling’s remnant. ;)
(Edit: “Kipling’s Remnant” just screams to be the title of a story, doesn’t it?)
Oh! That makes a great title – :D Now I need to go read Sturgeon’s Law – I have not heard of it – unless that’s one of the things in one of my bulging folders “stuff I need to read, look up, think about, consider….”
Hi, Kat. You have such a unique way of expressing yourself. Misfit characters for some reason made me think of the first Toy Story movie and that cruel character who kept dismembering his toys, but that’s another story…I have a folder on my laptop called Ideas. It has little bits and fragments of stories I’ve started over the years. I may get back to some of them, but most will just hang there, incomplete. It takes at least a couple of years of gestation before an idea of mine is ready to turn into a full blown novel. I have to roll it around in my brain and explore the possibilities. I used to be a pantser when it came to writing, but I am trying hard to be more of a plotter. I do a lot of prewriting in my head, so the ideas that have staying power are the ones that become novels. Does that make sense?
It does make sense! And I’d love to know the progress of the former panster becoming a plotter. I will wonder if the writing becomes “easier” or more difficult, or just different ….
Hahaha, that was quite entertaining. And eeeeekkk, that picture. I do keep a file with interesting character names and profiles for future projects. Now I’m imagining them getting together, plotting their way out of the file. Yikes.
Now I have that in my head too – LAWD!
Maybe that should be the next novel *laughing*
I thoroughly enjoyed this piece, Kathryn. You and I think far too much alike. Let me know if you ever need me to lend you my meds.
If I had a dime for every character I’ve left stranded and underdeveloped in some story I started writing but later abandoned, I’d have enough money to make a good living as a writer.
It’s an awful feeling to bring someone into the world only to leave them high and dry in the middle of a wayward plot. Thank goodness we authors aren’t required to pay “character support” to all the fictional folks we create and end up dumping on the side of an unfinished manuscript. Otherwise, I’d be dead broke. Or a deadbeat.
Several years ago, I started writing a novel about an author whose unfinished fictional characters come to life to seek revenge on him, but I ended up abandoning that manuscript to write an entirely different one. In other words, I abandoned several already-abandoned characters. Who DOES that? What kind of monster AM I?
To help me deal with the constant guilt, I recently wrote an open apology to all the characters I’ve ever created and left behind to rot in literary oblivion—even those who’ve existed only briefly in my head. Here it is:
Dear abandoned characters,
I’m so sorry for what I’ve done to you. I had no right. You did nothing to deserve such a fate.
It’s not you, it’s me. I don’t always know what I’m looking for in a story or a character. Still, that’s no excuse for creating you and leading you on. If it makes you feel any better, I often end up killing off many of my characters in the books I DO finish writing, so at least you dodged that.
Maybe you’ll meet another writer who can give you a future or at least some sense of closure, though I highly doubt it, as I never share my unfinished manuscripts with anybody, and I don’t think my computer has ever been hacked by anyone besides the U.S. Government. I guess I could introduce you to some of my writer friends to see if there’s any interest, but let’s face it—nobody likes to be set up.
I know this hasn’t been easy on you. I abandoned many of you so early in the writing process, you don’t even know where you live or work, or who your parents are or if you have any siblings. Many of you don’t know what, if any, religion you follow or if you are gay or straight or something in between. Some of you don’t even know your last name. And it’s all my fault. It’s no way for a writer to treat a fictional person. I know that, and I will never forgive myself for leaving you in such miserable limbo.
I incomplete you.
Nevertheless, I hope we can still be friends.
Regretfully,
GL
OMG! This made me laugh so much! laughing!
You know, I too had a novel I started about characters who came to life (kinda) and got all up in the author’s life and business trying to get her to write their story – it got all messy and weird and strange and it was AWESOME … then I abandoned it and them.
Can I borrow that letter? (And your meds? – laughing).
Glad you enjoyed it! Sicko.
Perhaps we’ll need to collaborate on the abandoned character’s revenge novel some day. Then mutually dump it.
And you’re welcome to use my letter in any way you see fit. So long as I get 99.9% of any royalties resulting from said use.
Of course, she said slyly .
need directions to abandoned misfit island. gonna gather up the more misfitty ones and turn ’em into a helluva horror (or love) story. same thing, i guess. *shrug*
write on!
Ohhhh – imagine it! A group of writers take a boat to the island of misfit characters to steal a few and – horrific things ensue!
Lovely idea, great picture. I think I have an Island of Misfit Stories somewhere ;-) And I used to have an Island of Misfit Ideas (you could not even call them stories yet), but some time ago I decided they need a better home. So I got myself a WordPress account, and whenever an idea comes up that threatens to get into the way of my current main story, I just quickly type it out and put it there. I think they are very happy there and don’t bother anyone, including me.
During the 1920’s, a black man named Coffee Rivers wandered the back roads of northern Florida and southern Georgia with his ten-year-old grandson and a small mule he called “Matanzas,” Spanish for “destroy.” He challenged white ranchers with a bet that his mule could whip their best stallion, a wager no white man could refuse. Coffee never lost a bet, and he stashed his winnings in a secret compartment in the mule’s leather bridle. One night, whites jumped Coffee and his grandson when they were camped along the banks of the Suwannee RIver. Coffee fought off the invaders so his grandson could escape, a plan Coffee had pre-arranged in case this ever happened. The boy survived, returned to bury his grandfather, and then set out on his own. He grew up working odd jobs where he could find them, while all the time making his way back to the family home near the Loxahatchee River on the south coast. There, when he’s sixteen, he finds a job on the Barlow (Bar-LO) Ranch. Coffee Rivers lives on forever on the Island of Misfits, but his grandson lives in my YA WIP.