When to Cut a Character?
This a difficult decision to make – especially when you’ve finished a draft or organised a plot around a developing character. I speak from experience. I cut a main character from The Sculptor and redeveloped a sub-character AFTER I’d finished writing the second draft! It was painful, though necessary, and the book benefitted from my ruthlessness. It actually breathed a sigh of relief because I’d removed a character that crowded the plot. Mind you, I loved this character. She was overbearing and I quite like overbearing! I had to write her to get to the other characters. She was my access. An access character often works like an access chapter. I’ve written three books and have never used an original first chapter. I think of an access character as a playing ground. You test personalities, dialogue, and direct action with this person, but they are not exactly necessary and don’t own their own story drive. Meaning, they are a character that facilitates. My main characters often start this way. They guide everything, like a tour guide, and then I return to the areas and personalities that are the strongest. Usually, as I figure out how to craft the purpose of the story I want to tell, my facilitator slots into one of these stronger personalities, but not always. And when they don’t, that character becomes irrelevant and needs to be cut. Each character must drive their own storyline that makes the reader feel some kind of empathetic connection, not like, love, hate, or even respect, but recognized emotion, even if that emotion is not one that we’re proud of. Don’t want to cut a character, even though you know you probably should, fine turn them into a space. Space is great at being an facilitator inside of a story. Space deserves its own personality. What would that character feel like as a town? A house? Try it! I do this all the time and it works for me. So, what happened to my overbearing character? She became a bear named Callisto. What did she sound like? Here is an excerpt from The Sculptor:
In the mountains and at home in his darkroom, Mathis hunted. He was a hunter of light. A hunter of illumination, where nothing remained untouched.
When Nora told him that she was pregnant, he thought of her womb as a camera, the captured seed was a slide and cells multiplied an image into view. When the baby was born, they named him Jacques, and were you to hold his skin up to the sun you would see a series of slides:
An infant nursing on a rocking chair. A barefoot child catching frogs.
A boy floating on his back in a pond and clouds racing their reflections over him.
A teenager standing in the silence of a snowy wood.
And so, on and on. Each image, each slide, a single molecule building the picture of Jacques and Mathis was there and he wasn’t there, like light through the trees, the presence of Mathis was dappled.
The year that Nora fell ill was the year Mathis met Callisto and something inside him stepped from one room into another, entirely. He hadn’t realized he’d been made of rooms.
He tracked the female bear for days through trees heavy with vine. The ferns were waist high, and the ground was wet and buggy. Her urine smelled like a woman’s heat and he felt her around every corner, so strong was her presence, that birds startled him, so did the rain. How could he have been so careless? His equipment was getting soaked. He walked back to his campsite, crawled inside the tent, and laid his camera out to dry. Rain fell and slid down the tarpaulin, while he sat grumbling and picking at things, a hair from his hat, dirt from his fingernail, fluff, finally, he got up and walked outside.
There she was.
A silver freight train of steam. Callisto reared up and he tasted the hot spray of her breath, saw her yellow teeth, her nostrils spat. What could he do?
He always had a wild heart.
He felt a part of himself incinerate, every bit of him burned with sweat, the rattle of her spit sawed the air, and a crack between them, like wood catching fire, catching instinct, struck. The animal in him rose up to greet her; she lowered, grunted, and walked away. It was terrifyingly simple. He named her Callisto, and when he returned in the autumn, Nora noticed that a part of his soul was, indeed, missing. It was the part that looked at her, only. He told her he’d been struck by lightning, but she knew photography had stolen him. Over time Mathis and Callisto came to resemble one another, as though his photographs were captured mirrors, so that by the time Jacques was a young boy, he couldn’t think of his father without thinking of Callisto. The two seemed fixed together like a handshake, like an ancient pact.
