Escaping the Default
On rewriting and rediscovering stories.
Ever since I discovered creative writing, I have fluctuated from one method to another, tried and ruined countless tropes, and tested out the weirdest ideas by slapping a WIP label on them. The one piece of advice I’ve always stuck to is this: Write what you want to read.
And so, as I grew up, my reading tastes changed. My WIPS evolved accordingly, merging genres and themes until the worlds they spelled out wove into a paracosm I’d have loved to read about as a kid. The plot moved on, as did the worldbuilding. But there was one part that remained unyieldingly stubborn up until recently — my characters.
As a Reader
Most people who identify as avid readers today have grown up on one or more of these fictional archetypes:
- Young detectives cracking mysteries like nobody’s business
- That one boarding school where you can’t rule out anything from happening
- A vibrant first-person account of a middle schooler’s life, usually accompanied by sketches
Or, if you’re like me, you have a history with all three. What started with the Famous Five and the Secret Seven led to the entire Blytonian world. Youngsters overcame their highly specified flaws to solve problems even the adults couldn’t wrangle. Students who went through set arcs for development to end their school years as Head Girl. These characters were the ones to be. Eventually, I graduated to the other staples of a bookish life: Harry Potter, Narnia, and Percy Jackson, each bringing new heroes to admire. It was around this time that I decided to write novels too. Obnoxiously loud as I was about this ambition, my English teachers took it upon themselves to push me towards the classics our curriculum lacked: Dickens, Stevenson, Shakespeare, etc. I should aim to write like that too.
I think that’s what I was supposed to feel. I didn’t.
To incorrectly quote Holden Caulfield, reading the lot made me feel quite illiterate. These works, the great literary feats of their time, tackled weighty themes with excellent prose. But they just didn’t click for me, not like my childhood favourites. The charm of a book does not depend on its wording alone, just like its message cannot carry the story. Even a simple tale about a pet’s shenanigans can and does often worm its way into our hearts, propelled by the emotion behind it. We bond with the characters, we feel for them. That’s how we become invested in their journey over the books. The people we find in literary classics, on the contrary, were written for a different time, a different place, a different society. What did I care about them?
Back to the drawing board, then.
As a Writer
After a disastrous first attempt, — a poorly-conceived Pokémon spinoff that was axed the second I learned what copyright was — some semblance of an original plotline evolved, and then a third, a fourth, a fifth. For years my own stories heavily featured meringues and ginger beer (never mind that I’d tried neither) and first forms in boarding schools (who cared about the Indian education structure). My characters were invariably British too, with well-researched anglicized names and a “Golly!” on the tip of their tongues.
Somewhere down the line, they switched to American. With everyone around me hooked on one Disney show or another, I decided on a protagonist in the U.S. as the default. Cue more white names, looking into September start-of-terms, a list of New York area codes. However much I loved my story, writing it was becoming a chore. Every move my characters made seemed inauthentic, copied from some other book or show I couldn’t trace. In the first-person narrative, I didn’t even have a full hold on their normal lives.
Beyond the Archetype
Somehow, consuming this narrow category of media built up a default character type in my mind: white, cis, straight, with traditionally ‘heroic’ qualities. The characters I wrote felt like cardboard cut-outs instead of real people. Concurrent with writer’s block came a reading slump. My childhood frequents lost their charm, as did conventionally popular series like Harry Potter. The so-called classics had never appealed to me.
It was during the pandemic, when days stretched on and attention spans shrunk in Zoom classes, that I stumbled upon Book Riot. This gold mine of a website has found me some of my favourite reads, far away from mainstream literature and its West-centric narratives. Instead of combing through character traits to find ones I could relate to (read: project on), I found protagonists with my skin colour, family dynamics, and social structures. Instead of a token mention in a sea of white people, these characters led the plot and claimed the spotlight.
Editing alone is daunting enough. Rewriting a finished book is like trying to fit in one puzzle piece while losing three more. But I would have loved to read stories like that from the start. Sticking to my preconceived notions about how popular books ‘should’ be while seeking the very opposite? Hypocritical wouldn’t even begin to cover it.
And so I decided to alter my story. Rewrite it in a way that would make me want to read it. Names and descriptions — to be changed. Backstories — to be revised. Plotlines — to be adjusted.
Characters — to be fleshed out.
Outside the default, that is. Despite how tedious the technicalities are, I’ve never enjoyed writing more. Because now I understand my protagonists’ culture, their habits, and their lives. I can pinpoint exactly what drives them. This time I actually know my characters.
Originally published at https://theparacosmicmuse.substack.com
