The Luck of the Fictional Character

First, a belated happy St. Patrick’s Day to all!

As I was enjoying my St. Patrick’s Day plans (the reason for the lateness of this post) yesterday, I started thinking about luck. Not the luck of the Irish, but the luck of the fictional character.

I didn’t start out thinking about my own characters, actually, but about my favorite young adult series (okay, I admit there is one other YA series, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, that I thought was better — but it was also much shorter, so as much as I loved it, Harry Potter is still the bigger influence on my own young adulthood). I grew up with Harry Potter and his friends, so I mean no disrespect to the series, its fans or J.K. Rowling, who I still think is a fabulous author (and one of the YA authors who actually deserves respect! Take that how you want to.). But it just crossed my mind how very lucky Harry gets at a certain point near the end of the final book (for the sake of anyone who hasn’t read the book by now but still might in the future, I’m leaving it at that — no spoiler alert needed).

What I love about Harry, the series and Rowling is that the characters choose to do things. For the most part, it’s about as character-driven a story as you can have within the epic framework of a Dark Lord plotting domination. (Same for His Dark Materials, actually. Minus the Dark Lord, for the most part.) So the fact that a pretty important part of the story is determined by luck really got me thinking. Actually, it might have been my fiance who got me thinking, when I told him my observation and he told me, “Well, your characters have luck, too. It’s just really bad luck.”

My characters have their fair share of bad things happen, I’ll give you that. But except for one very tragic thing that happens to one of the two main characters years before chapter one occurs, I can argue the point about bad luck. I think it’s a lot more bad (though mostly understandable) decisions on the part of both main characters and the other characters surrounding them that creates their misfortunes. There’s an exploration in the story about whether fate plays a part in life or not, but even if you’re committed to the fate theory, I think it’s different from luck. One way or another, this character was supposed to meet the other character, one way or another their relationship would have developed along those lines, etc.

The luck conversation also got me thinking about the what-ifs in the story. For example, in chapter one, I have two characters in the same place, and something happens to just one of them. But if that same circumstance had happened to the other character, instead — if instead of shielding his friend and love interest, the male lead had chosen to protect himself, instead, and left her vulnerable — it would be a totally different story. Even though it’s the same settings and characters, with the same big-picture issues, this parallel universe of my story flips all character motivation upside down.

The alternate story would be much shorter and much simpler. And I probably wouldn’t care enough to write it. I’m writing the story because the relationship between these two characters (and the ways they view themselves because of it) intrigues me. There’s nothing intriguing about the inverse relationship. It lacks the depth, development and conflicted emotions that make me want to keep writing the current story (and I hope, will make my eventual readers want to keep reading it).

But I never sat down with a pencil and a sheet of paper and traced the outlines of the plot in various cases. It never once occurred to me that the protective character should have been anything but protective of the woman he’s always wanted to be with, even though she’s with someone else. On one hand, I guess, that’s a part of characterization. One thing I knew about him from the very earliest drafts, almost from day one, was that he would protect her, whether or not she wanted or needed him to, because he felt a need to.

I wonder, now, what I would have done if any of those what-ifs had struck me as better than what is. This far into a story, would I be compelled to finish it as is? Or would I backtrack to the nearest common point and start over on the new path? Or maybe part of the writing instinct that guided me through this story so far had chosen this story precisely because it was the only trajectory that resonated with me.

Writers (and readers), any thoughts on characters’ luck or the what-ifs of fiction? And if your story’s what-if sounded better than what is, how do you think you would handle it?