Should Characters be Treated as Real People?

Yesterday, I came across a post on the Fantasy Genre Lounge on the NaNo forums that regarded the topic of character "realness". For the past few years that I've known about the National Novel Writing Month, I've maintained that even though I may outline and plan, bordering on obsessively, my characters actually have the final say on plot outliers and the like. You know the deal, really interesting tangent that you figure you can fit into the main narrative to explain a little bit of one of your character's motivation and background? I generally chalk that up to the character in question begging to be explored a little more.

But, in keeping with topic, the author of the post brings up good points to the contrary of a character's life and reality (in the figurative sense, not the literal).

Writing a novel requires that you take mastery over the facets of your novel the way a skilled painter would the pigments on his or her palette. Your characters, plot, theme, setting, and dialogue are all under your exclusive control. No external force, no magical muse, is taking your hand and making you do anything. That's why I tend to feel frustration when I see a would-be author blaming one of the aforementioned for hijacking the tale.

I both agree and disagree with their sentiments here. Yes, you have direct control over what your characters say, think, do, and like. But sometimes there are points in which your mind begins to think as if it was the character. Your mind says, "hey, this would be something extremely cool to put in the story, because it explores a what-if situation you hadn't planned on". That's what I speak about when I say that my character set off on a tangent. I don't go out of my way and say that my character is writing the story using me as a vessel to set his words on paper (or screen).

You are telling the tale, and should be consciously making use of your novel's elements to do so. The lion's share of misplaced blame for novel derailment gets heaped on characters. When you're saying "My character refuses to do this!" what you're really telling us is that you've failed to give the character proper motivations in the story up to this point, and now your mind does not feel that it would be logical for the character to move on to your desired course.

Now this is something I definitely agree with the post's author on. Character motivations are a tricky business, but are absolutely essential to a good tale. Sometimes you as a writer forget to add something essential that would cause a character to do something or to think some particular way. That's the beginning of a pretty big plot hole just waiting to happen. Your inner editor stops you before you make the plunge into this plot hole, and that's when you run into issues in your will to write. That's when irrelevant tangents take over your story and it begins to act in a different way than you want. And if you don't want it that way, the readers likely won't either. To use a cooking analogy and try and warp it into a writing one, don't use a wine that you wouldn't drink to cook with. In writing, that becomes, if you don't like writing it, your reader won't like to read it.

One method is to go on the new logical route and see where it takes you. If you are a discovery writer, as opposed to someone who outlines, this can be a healthy process. If it's going to leave your story in shambles instead, or destroy all of the carefully laid plans for your plot, then you need to step back and rewind. Find out where you failed to give your characters proper motivation, and make the necessary changes. Take ownership of your characters as tools to tell your tale.

Of course, pantsers are allowed, and in fact celebrated. But here's another part where I agree with the post. If you don't directly control your characters when you're outlining, things can become very messy, very quickly; unless of course some of these subplots would actually work well with the main plot (see my original blurb).

The big pitfall of believing your characters are actual, sentient beings is that you lose the ability to tell the best possible story with them. Grow too attached and you'll always find a way to keep bad things from happening to the character. You'll enhance their traits until they're the embodiment of everything you want to be. You'll give them unrealistic rewards, or become blind to their faults. You'll stop using them to serve the needs of the story, and they will become a parody of excellence that you may adore, but no one else will want to read.

Sometimes, bad things need to happen to great characters to facilitate the best possible outcome. If you behave as if you're the characters' kind and loving creator, instead of an artist who is using a tool to shape your tale, you're always going to be tempted to mitigate any disasters that occur to your imaginary friends. 

Here, they make another very valid argument in why falling too "in love" with your characters is a massive mistake. In fact, to correlate their point, I'm going to pull an example from one of my favorite video games to show exactly what they mean. In Mass Effect, you play a character called Commander Shepard. In the most basic terms I can afford to use, they are a bad ass (trying to avoid pronouns because it's up to you whether they're male or female). But at the start of Mass Effect 2, the developers, BioWare decide to throw you a big 'ole curveball (you only need to watch 'till 2:49 for full effect). They aren't afraid to destroy what they've built in the first game in order to provide a richer storytelling experience. Many writers would do well to heed this advice, and don't grow too attached to their characters. Of course, just a little is necessary for believability, but as it is in almost all things, moderation is key.

So, what do you think about the issue? Are characters real entities, entitled to their own opinions apart from what you have set out for them? Or are they tools with awesome personalities and weird quirks that make you love them?