Revised May 8 2013
I don’t decide how my characters live their lives. I create
them, give them personality, then they live. When I’m writing a book, I come up
with some sort of idea of what may happen, then jump into their lives at some
point. They decide what they do and how the story goes. Just because I think
something will happen, doesn’t mean it does. Many times I’ve wanted to have
something happen, but the characters make decisions that end up leading away
from my idea. I fully believe in letting my characters run the show, after
all it is their lives, I’m just writing it. I rarely know what’s going to
happen next in any of the stories. And it’s not just the main characters that
do this to me, most of the minor characters do it too, just less often since
they are minor parts. I write like life, you never know what’s going to happen
next, and you can’t make someone do something they don’t want to, and you can’t
make them change it once they have.
Speaking of my characters making their own choices. I had
the next ten to twenty pages planned out for Blair and Erik (the lead
characters in one of my books). It was going great, then Erik had to go and do
something unexpected, changing everything. I’ve had to go back and reread
everything I’ve wrote on the book to figure out how to make his decision and
following consequences fit in with the plot I had set out in my head. Well, to
be fair to Erik, it wasn’t just him. A new character jumped in from nowhere and
helped force Erik’s hand so to speak.
Sometimes it’s hard when your characters rule and you’re just riding
along. Makes for interesting writing though, except for when it ruins what you
were planning.
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