Deviation

-

I spent October planning my November project. I had the ending, then the beginning, then filled in all the bits in between until the story was complete, both in my mind and in my timeline. Then one of my characters asked a question I hadn't been expecting and the story has jumped the tracks. Instead of hunkering down in their house, preparing to defend themselves, my family is in a hotel, five hours away from the antagonists. With a tight deadline (for the antagonists, not for the story) I now have to find a way to get the family back into town and into the factory unit where the final showdown will take place.

This has left me wondering about outlining. Without the outline I don't think I would have come this far in my story, but if my character hadn't asked that question, which once asked seemed blindingly obvious, I'd have followed the outline to conclusion and a reader would have asked it instead. That might have left a glaring and embarrassing plot hole. Does this count as a failure? If so, then it's an excellent learning experience, but I don't think so.

My characters, in my head at least, have developed individual personalities. Mum is strong, forthright and pissed off. Dad is timid, almost cowardly. Billy is blunt and brutal. Andrew is damaged. Vince is desperate to cling on to what he's recently discovered and what may be soon snatched away from him. So I shouldn't be surprised if one of them, perhaps more than one, takes a path, makes a decision or asks a question that I hadn't foreseen. They are growing. Outgrowing the meagre roles I laid out for them, like actors in a play making the lines their own.

So they've deviated. They've taken the story off in another direction and I can handle that. I might extend the antagonist's deadline. I might gift them superhuman powers that allow them to trace the family or even force them, in some mind-controlly way, to return to the unit. Because the machine runs from a generator, I suppose they might be able to dismantle it and take it to somewhere near the family, saving them the five-hour drive back.

I suppose I should be glad that the characters are now helping to write the story and I don't have to do it all myself, but that leaves me wondering how other writers deal. I'm thinking, for example, of a writer under contract who's submitted an outline and then finds the story changing as they create it. Perhaps outlining becomes more accurate with experience, or more experienced writers create looser outlines, with pathways that touch certain waypoints through the prose, meeting the outline in the right place again just before the end.

These are the random thoughts I'm having today and writing them out helps me to think about them. It also helps me to distract myself from the fact that I can't work on my actual project while so many bloody fireworks keep going off outside. I know it's going to be pretty much all night, so I'll find something else to do for a few hours.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Redrafting Rewind and an Overview of Other Work

-
Image
I'm rewriting Rewind - or redrafting, revising, whatever. I don't know the correct terminology yet and I've no idea if I'm even doing it the right way, but it's working, so in the absence of any better methods, I'm going to stick to what I'm doing. I've got it open in Scrivener and have moved the entire first draft into the notes folder. I have the editing window split, with the first draft of the scene on the right and the new draft on the left. I'm retyping everything. I was concerned about the word count for Rewind, as it topped out at between 40-50,000 words. I can't honestly remember the final count. I've read conflicting views about whether that would constitute a novel, with some websites saying that a novel needs to be at least 50,000 words, in which case Rewind would have been a novella. Other sites, however, say that 40,000 words is the baseline for a novel.  Either way, the rewrite is increasing the word count by around twenty-five...
Read more

Johnny Bananas - Flash Fiction (909 Words)

-
     Whenever someone walks into the club and asks for Johnny, it always reminds me of the Pink Floyd song, Have a Cigar. By the way, which one’s Pink?      The club is called Johnny Bananas and even as I write this it still sounds better to me in an American accent, as if Johnny Bananas was a New York gangster from the fifties. It sounds ridiculous coming out of the mouths of locals, with their broad Norfolk accents. I’d thought more than once about putting a video on TikTok asking people with different accents across the UK to record themselves saying it, just so I could see which was the funniest. I bet that it would be Brummie or Scouse, but I’d like to hear it, just to be sure.      Johnny Bananas isn’t a person. There isn’t even a John on the payroll. The owner is an ex-Para called Rob who opened the club after a mate of his won the lottery. He’s made a point of getting to know all the local veterans and he started the place to give th...
Read more

Predictable

-
Image
I’ve just finished reading a book that was extremely well-written but painfully predictable. I’m not going to name the book or the author, partly out of respect and partly because I don’t want her ripping my work to pieces at a later date. It opened with the discovery of a body, female, of course, abducted, raped, strangled and left in a signature pose by the killer. After a second identical murder victim has a common contact in her phone book, a man is arrested on circumstantial evidence. You’ve probably already guessed that while this man is in custody another victim is found. If I go on to tell you that the investigating officer has a daughter of the same age and at the same college as the other victims, I think you know what else is coming. The investigating officer is taken off the case but, of course, insists on pursuing every lead. Her daughter stops answering her phone at the exact moment the detective realises that one of her daughter's friends is the killer and she ...
Read more