Minds of Their Own

While writing my fourth Noelani Lee adventure a couple of years ago, I found I had painted myself into a corner, with no clear path of escape.

Toward the end of the novel, I got hung up on an important plot element and, no matter how much thought I put into it, I couldn’t figure out how to extricate myself from a trap I’d laid for myself.

Then one of my characters opened his mouth, inserted his foot, and revealed a critical clue Noelani needed to unravel the mystery. From that point on, it was clear sailing to finish the book.

I know what you’re thinking: the character didn’t say it, but instead, I wrote it. Yet I beg to differ. True, I was the person typing the words, but I hadn’t planned on the character tripping himself up. In fact, it…well, it simply came out. And as I wrote it, lightbulbs flicked on and bells rang and I felt a surge of adrenaline, and I leaped from my corner and finished the book in a rush.

One could argue I’d tucked this exposition away in my subconscious and released it at the appropriate time in the narrative. Fair enough. But I prefer to think this character—who to that point had shared little of anything with anybody but wound up buckling under pressure—blurted out his admission of his own free will.

 Part of the fun of writing is allowing characters to do as they damn well please. Sure, we can corral them as best we can, and we often succeed in making them act and speak as we desire. But there are times when they rebel against our authoritarian impulses and there ain't a thing we can do to stop them. When this happens, the best course of action you as a writer can take is to follow them and see where they take you and your story.

This happens more than you think, and often to writers of great stature. Take this example from an interview with Outlander author Diana Gabaldon:

From the beginning, she learned that characters have a mind of their own. On her third day of writing, she introduced an English woman who, unbeknownst to her, was her protagonist, Claire Beauchamp.

“When she walked into the scene, I had no idea who she was or what she’d do,” Gabaldon said. “All of the men in the room were staring at her, but I didn’t know why. Then she opened her mouth and started talking like a modern woman. I fought with her for several pages, trying to make her talk like an 18th century woman, but she just kept talking like a smart-alecky modern woman. It’s all Claire’s fault there’s time travel in ‘Outlander,'” Gabaldon said.

Romance author Jenna Sutton encountered the same phenomenon when writing one of her novels:

Ava Grace’s dialogue just flowed from my fingers… words just came out of nowhere. Trust me, I know how ridiculous that sounds. How could this character—one I’ve created in my head—say something that I didn’t expect?

But that’s exactly what happened. She responded in a way that was authentic to her character, not the way I had planned her to respond, and I wasn’t very happy about it. I tried to ignore her—to force her to do what I wanted.

But she resisted. And once I stopped trying to tell her what to say and do, she became one of the easiest characters for me to write.

So, fellow writer, how often do you let your characters off the leash? Do you keep them close and dictate their every move, utterance, and facial tic? Or, do you unburden yourself from micromanaging their lives and let them speak and act for themselves—and if so, how did you it work out for you and your work?