A Dance or Ritual to Establish Expertise, Not a “Classic Mistake”

In my last post, I called the interviewer’s failure to pursue what was going on between the writer and his characters a “classic mistake,” by which I meant that writers are always saying those kinds of things about how they don’t create their characters, and interviewers never ask more about it.

However “mistake” may be the wrong word, because it implies that the interviewer really wanted to know all about the characters, that the writer really wanted to tell, and that they were both inept.

But people such as the interviewer and writer in this case are not inept. If they didn’t pursue the issue, it’s because they didn’t want to. So they must have had another reason for her question and his answer.

I think that they were using that question and answer as markers of their expertise. The interviewer was showing that she was no amateur who thought that writers create their characters. Her question about how the characters “arrive” (not how they are created) showed that she is a professional.

And the writer was also showing that he is is a professional. Amateur writers create their characters. Professional fiction writers, quoted again and again in this blog, have characters that, somehow, seem to arrive with minds of their own.

If anyone is making a classic mistake, it’s the readers of such interviews who don’t complain that they are not getting the whole story.