You might’ve heard writers say things like ‘my characters keep on doing things I don’t want them to’, or ‘my characters are always surprising me’. For a long time I thought this was nonsense—if you’re writing the story, surely you’re in control. Those characters are your inventions. They do what you want them to.
But this happens to me. I’ll be writing, and because of my planning I’ll have a solid idea of where the scene’s going. Then I’ll have a line of dialogue come to me, and before I’m aware of it the words are out of my mind and onto the screen. I’ll read it back and realise this one line could throw the whole story off-script.
Maybe I should illustrate this with a couple of examples.
The main character in the story I’m currently working on (a story adjacent to the main series, because I needed a break—read my previous post for more information) is called Kane. He’s a loner. He’s been through a lot, done things he’s not proud of, and he’s learnt from his mistakes. Older and wiser (he hopes), he prefers to solve problems without resorting to violence, but if things get physical he can usually take care of himself.
As the story progresses he finds himself on a courier vessel, a part of a team hired for a particular job. But Kane manages to enter the crew’s area, where he strikes up something like a friendship with the vessel’s captain (once she’s overcome her wariness of him).
But as I wrote scenes where they talked I became aware that some of their dialogue and behaviours, bordered on flirting. This came from both the captain and Kane.
This wasn’t something I’d planned on. Kane generally doesn’t like people—he’ll work with them, and he can be sociable when it’s required, but he’s content on his own. H isn’t looking for any kind of relationship, even a short-term one.
At least, I didn’t think he was. But maybe there’s a side to Kane I wasn’t aware of.
But I didn’t plan for anything like this. It’s going to force me to reassess the rest of the story—if I introduce a bit of flirtation, that sets up an expectation. If I then ignore this flirting I’m not honouring an implicit promise—that this flirting will be relevant or important in some way.
Let’s look at another example. Kane comes into contact with another member of the crew (who I haven’t yet named). This crew-member is antagonistic towards Kane, and I initially thought this was because Kane shouldn’t have been in the crew area. But in a later conversation with the captain she said that this crew-member has been struggling for a while now.
The vessel, by this stage of the story, is docked at what I’m calling an orbital—a satellite the size of a large town. There are tensions on the orbital, with different factions vying for power—a situation that will, over the course of the story, push Kane to ‘save the day’.
But as Kane and the captain talk, she mentions that this crew-member has worked on the orbital before, and that this is a big part of his problems.
I have no idea where that came from. But as I thought about it, I saw possibilities. I saw how a troubled past could interact with the current situation. I saw how it could enhance the whole book.
But, as with the flirting, it’s going to mess with my planning.
So I have two options. Either I go with it, or I rewrite these scenes to edit out these ‘surprises’.
I’m reticent to throw these surprises out, though. Because there’s something important going on here.
I’ll try to explain.
We’ve been conditioned to think of work as ‘doing things’. If we’re being paid, we’re expected to be physically doing things for the time we spend at work. If there’s nothing productive to do, we find things to make us look busy—because not doing anything isn’t working.
It’s the same with writing. If words aren’t going down—whether in drafting, planning or editing—then it feels as if we’re not really writing. There’s a certain amount of pressure to produce a certain number of words each day. When we’re not physically writing (or typing) there’s a nagging guilt, and we tell ourselves we’re being lazy.
But writing, as with any creative activity, is far more than simply ‘doing the physical activity’. So much of writing involves thinking. We need to think about our stories and our characters. We need to explore different possibilities. In science-fiction we need to imagine exciting and interesting technologies, wild new worlds, craft that can travel across the vastness of space.
Some of that thinking is ‘active’. It happens when we’re sitting at our (metaphorical) desks. This is the kind of thinking we do at the laptop, typing up our ideas as they occur, or scribbling into a notepad. This is the thinking we do between lines, when we look up from the laptop and stare into space for a while, mentally running through possibilities for the next paragraph.
But thinking goes far deeper. When working on a story (or a whole series) we have countless ideas in our minds. We need to write them down to keep track of them, but those ideas are still buzzing around when we’re not typing or writing. We have a problem in the story, and that problem sits in our mind. We ruminate on it. It’s easy to become distracted while doing something else because we’re trying to find a solution.
And, far too often, that solution seems to come out of the blue, and at some random time. In the shower, or while exercising, or as we’re dropping off to sleep.
Because these problems sink into our subconsciousness. And our subconscious minds are churning away all the time. We’re ‘thinking’ even when we’re not thinking.
So when ideas seem to appear out of the blue—when characters do things I hadn’t planned or say things which go way off-script—I have to take notice. Chances are, these surprises come from my subconscious mind, and are solutions to problems I’m not yet fully conscious of in the story.
So Kane and the captain’s flirtation tells me I probably need to open Kane up to the possibility of not being so much of a loner. Or maybe it’s telling me that there’s another part of the captain’s character I haven’t fully understood yet, a part that is going to influence Kane’s decisions later in the story. And the crew-member’s history with the orbital tells me I need to make the story deeper to make it richer. It’s forcing me to reconsider Kane’s motivations for various things I ‘want’ him to do.
Does this mean more work? Definitely. I need to pause (maybe not for too long) and adjust my planning. When it comes to editing I’ll need to make sure these surprises don’t feel too random, that they’re foreshadowed as much as they need to be. And maybe this will lead to more ‘problems’ later on, with more things needing to be worked out when it comes to the edit.
But the extra work is worth it if it makes the story better.
This post originally appeared on my Substack, as a part of my attempt to document my work on a new series. If you’d like to read these posts as they are published, delivered to your in-box, then sign up to my Substack for free by clicking here.
TW Iain 