I read a book a while back that had me puzzled. It was well crafted, colorful, moved at a good pace, but there was something skewed... I put my finger on it when I reread the description of the hero. He was just fabulous. His name consisted of four luscious, historical names strung together. He was a duke, the king's best friend. But the thing that brought everything into focus was his physical description, right down to his blond sideburns, in lingering detail. Gosh, he was handsome, with that bloom of golden hairs that bordered those sideburns. Yep, I thought. An author's pet.
You run into them fairly often in detective series. The characters who set foot in a messy situation and you just know that things will be straightened out at once. They're always fabulously handsome or beautiful, unbelievably accomplished.
A recent series of mysteries had as its main sleuth a woman who was, among other things, an Olympic Equestrian, a (top winning) competitive ballroom dancer in addition to being young, beautiful, and a top-ranking forensic anthropologist. I wasn't sure when she slept. Another story featured a female sleuth, fresh out of college, who happened to be visiting the UK when a bad situation came up. She was summoned to Scotland Yard and had an interview with one of the top-ranking people there.
"I want you to assist us with this," he says to her. "We need your trained mind."
Trained mind? I thought. In a kid that age? Well, to be fair, it was the writer's first book, and from what I could see he/she was trading on the fact that his/her mother was a best-selling author. And the writer had quite an author's pet.
Writers do have them. I have a character who could be one. I love writing about him. He's a lot of fun, lends a lot of color to his stories (I'm working on a sequel). He's my own invention - except for his name, which is historical. Who is he? An Egyptian crown prince. Named for the eldest son of Ramesses II, but I went off on a tangent with his story.
I don't think he is quite the 'ta-DA!' sort. I worked very hard to keep him from being one. He has his own reality.
I think what lies at the heart of 'Authors' Pets' is the author imposing his or her own desires on the character without taking into account the personality of the character as developed through the author's writing. The moment you put words on paper they become real. If you have something happen in your story, it is fact. So, if in the course of a story you have a character that behaves in a certain way and has (at least in your mind) certain characteristics, then everything he does must be in conformity with his reality as you have given it.
My Crown Prince character (his name is 'Hori') started out as a villain of sorts. About twenty years ago I started writing various vignettes based on books I was working on at the time. This was before I had a computer and electronic storage ability. These vignettes (I called them 'fragments' or 'blips') occurred to me and I typed them out. I had several stories based on the character of Khaemwaset, the fourth son of Ramesses and, at one point, his crown prince. We know a fair amount about him. In the course of weaving stories around him, I jotted an account of a jubilee festival that he hosted for his father when he was High Priest at Memphis.
His older brother, the Crown Prince, makes an appearance and says something nasty.
The jottings sit in a three-ring binder, but Pharaoh's Son owes some of its substance to them. In that novel a colossal statue falls in the middle of a festival throng, causing havoc. Khaemwaset (from now on 'Khay') looks into matters; it happened in his own backyard, since he is the Vizier, or Prime Minister, of Northern Egypt, and the High Priest of the temple where it occurred. He asks for assistance from Pharaoh, who sends his Crown Prince, (from now on 'Hori') to oversee things with his brother.
Hori was not a happy fellow. He was arrogant, had a sharp tongue, and did not suffer fools gladly. He strode into the story...
When you write about someone, you work both forward (in time) and backward (in history). Going forward the character might do something...but that may have arisen out of something that happened before. So it was with Hori. His history developed - a soldier who is happiest overseeing the military concerns of the realm, called back to court against his wishes and angry and unhappy. So why did Khay ask for him? Hm... Because they had renewed their friendship and Khay knew that Hori was unhappy.
The story moved from there. A character that was supposed to be, if not a villain, certainly an unpleasant sort of person with humorous involvement, became one of the two heroes of the story. I guess I let him grow up.
I've read books where the characters appear to have been stamped out and maneuvered like puppets. I've read scenes that, given the characters' personalities and histories as developed in the course of the story, should never have happened. Well...
Georgette Heyer, in Sylvester, or The Wicked Uncle, expresses things nicely:
These naïve words struck Phoebe dumb for several moments. It had not previously occurred to her that Ianthe might identify herself with The Lost Heir's golden-haired sister. Having very little interest in mere heroes and heroines she had done no more than depict two staggeringly beautiful puppets, endow them with every known virtue, and cast them into a series of hair-raising adventures from which, she privately considered, it was extremely improbable they would ever have extricated themselves.
