The Relationship Between Writer and Character (Stranger Than Fiction – SPOILERS)

When you’re writing  the characters for your story or script, more often than not, you will grow to know and love your character, maybe more than anybody you actually know. Characters first start off as a mere concept or basic idea. The more we flesh them out and give them ‘quirks’ or flaws, the more real they are. The more real we make them, the more immersive your book or film will become. And what’s more frustrating than reading a book or watching a film and having a character that just doesn’t seem to have any substance? This is why casting characters in movies is a very big deal; an actor can make or break a character, and vice versa. (e.g think about all the actors who have played Batman, some actors made more sense than others. And for some people, the wrong choice can completely destroy the whole experience.)

Recently I just watched Stranger than Fiction for the first time yesterday and I loved it. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s about a man who suddenly can hear the ‘voice over’ narrating his life. If you do not wish to spoil the film for yourself, stop reading now!

The film is a refreshing take on storytelling and really questions the relationship between a writer and their characters. For instance, as writers we might become very attached to the characters we have written, growing to love them like our children, siblings, perhaps even lovers (actually, no, that’s kinda weird). Regardless of how you see your characters, we have that deep connection with them. We’ve given them life and we dictate what they do in their story. So when it comes to finishing the story, or even killing them off, the process of writing that can be challenging. This film touches on that in a way that we can relate with Emma Thompson’s character, Karen Eiffel.

In the film, we are also able to learn about what drives a narrative forward and what makes a character. When Harold Hick seeks help a literature professor, Jules Hilbert, after learning about his ‘imminent death’ from the voice-over he is asked about what kind of person he is. Because Hick doesn’t disclose any ‘interesting’ information about himself, Hilbert is confused as to why he is a character in a book. This is true when it comes to writing because our characters have to be engaging, making the audience or reader want to know more about them. But when we discover that Hick has a love-hate relationship brewing with a client, and an innate desire to learn guitar, Hilbert is able to conclude that he is in either a drama/tragedy or a romantic comedy and suggests that he not do anything that will ‘drive the narrative’, i.e stay home and not do anything.

The interesting thing about this particular story is that I feel that Hick’s seemingly mundane life could be a representation of Karen Eiffel’s current state. In the film she is suffering from writers’ block, unable to progress any further in her writing. Whereas in her story, Harold Hick is at a dead-end job with no prospects for his future. It’s also worth noting that all of Karen’s characters die at the end of her books. Writing Harold Hick could perhaps be a metaphor for her own struggles in writing, her inability to refrain from killing off her characters. Hick immediately becomes interesting in his own unique way especially because, now, he can hear the narrator. He has been made aware of his ‘fate’ and now we have multiple narratives; Hick’s death and his relationship with Miss Pascal (his client), and his confrontation with Karen Eiffel, the latter acting as a ‘drive’ for his story and the prior as components of Karen’s story.

The relationship between Karen and Harold as author and character isn’t described in a great amount of detail. As a viewer, I was dying to know how Harold could hear Karen’s voiceover as she wrote his story! A lot of questions were left unanswered: is Harold real? Or is he a figment of Karen’s vivid imagination? Did she birth him into this world? What about the other characters in her story? But, in a way, the film answers it’s own questions. The film is an abstract interpretation of the writer’s relationship with his/her characters and the manifestation of our deep connection with those character’s when we start to write them. Whether Harold was a ‘real’ person or not, he is real to Karen. And that connection is true to many writers. And, even though Karen’t story ended with Hick not dying, he continued to live on, as many characters do in the minds of their creators’.