Tag: Journey

Obligatory apology for it being so bloody long since I last posted anything. My excuse is that I’ve spent at least some of the time writing my novel instead so I think you’ll forgive me that!

Now, this blog is supposed to be about my experiences in writing, from a novice/amateur/whatever person’s point of view, and a few months ago I experienced something I had always been a little dubious of which I had planned to share with you long before now. But as I said, I got on with my writing (and the rest of life’s distractions) and the blog was left to gather dust.

Recently I’ve realised that in all those snippets of time I have sat in the kitchen with not quite enough time to really get my teeth into writing or practising the piano (another thing I always wanted to do but had always left for ‘later’) or any number of other things it feels like you have to set aside a good chunk of time for. In those moments I realised I could probably rattle off a blog post. I figure it’s better to post regularly, than have quarterly epics etc.

So I’m back with a post I’ve been meaning to write for ages and I think I’m repeating myself.

The thing I had always been dubious of was when I saw people say things like ‘Sometimes my characters surprise me’ or ‘I had this in mind, but my character decided to do such and such instead’.

I always thought ‘How can you not know what your character is going to do? It’s YOUR character, YOUR story.’ It never made sense to me that, if you had a story in mind, your characters would not follow that story, because otherwise what the hell was going on?

Such is the part of me that focuses on logic and order. How wrong that part of me was.

There I was writing away. My character was following the path I had outlined for him and things were going smoothly. He was supposed to be framed for stealing from a ship that he had worked on and, deciding he’d had enough of being treated like crap, leave and travel to another city where he would meet up with my other characters and the story would continue as planned. AS PLANNED.

Then it happened. My fingers were typing the word ‘stowaway’ and I realised that he’d decided he wasn’t going to leave for the city to meet my other characters, the cheeky bugger was going to set sail and end up on another continent. What the heck was happening?

https://giphy.com/embed/3oEduQWmX8DaioK4cU

That was a few chapters ago and I’ve since planned a new path for both him and my other characters. One I’m happier with. I had always said about my outline that it was a roughly drawn map, and I was happy for my story to wind it’s way from start to end, so long as I knew basically where it was going. I never imagined my characters would end up forcing me to add other continents to that map, but perhaps that is a sign I am being more creative than I thought I could be, and I can definitely live with that.