Sometimes My Characters Surprise Me

On Saturday, I got a chance to spend a large part of the day writing, thanks to Christmas and birthday Lego that needed to get put together. All three of my boys (that includes the hubby) lose all interest in the world outside the Lego table when there are new bricks to squish together and play with.

So I snuck off to the office, set up my laptop, and got to it. I was able to get nearly 10K words written, which was lovely. But about half-way through that, my male main character took me completely by surprise and quit his job. I really didn’t want him to do that. His job was somewhat central to the plot I had in my mind. And here is where I begin to be thankful that I finally got over the idea that you have to write in a particular way.

For the longest time, I wrote the way the writing books teach you to write. Which means I would outline and put together notebooks of character information and so on and so forth. And then once I’d spent months with them and the idea of my book, I’d sit down to write, get about 10K words in and…be bored to tears. Writing that way works for a lot of people, and given my personality and how much I like to have organization (I’m a software engineer – I like neat and tidy!) I really thought it would work for me. But it just didn’t. And it wasn’t until I let go of that that I could finish anything I started.

So, giving up on that has freed me to let the characters do things that have me sitting back, taking my hands off the keyboard, and saying to myself, “Huh. Now what?” But what’s exciting, is his decision to do that led to a much deeper exploration of why he wanted the job in the first place and has, I think, made the story stronger. (I guess we’ll see what my editor has to say about it when I get it turned in.)

Either way, it was an exciting weekend for me – not only from the quantity of words I got added to my novel (nearly at the finish line, thankfully!) but because I love those moments where the characters stop me in my tracks and leave me to figure out what happens next when I’d already thought I had a pretty decent mental map of where it was supposed to go.

Did you have any good surprises this weekend?