Do you ever surprise yourself when you write?

I was just writing a confrontational scene which I had envisaged going a particular way and then it escalated into someone firing a pistol which I never anticipated but the character doing it would have done precisely that, possibly worse, so I just let him take over.

I can't imagine the answer is no, but does this sort of thing happen to anyone else?

 

Yeah actually. I recently added a part to Shadow Hunters where the Orc leader was calling a meeting to bring other monsters in the story to join his Legion. At the end, all the monsters agreed to bow to him and were granted one favor in return. I had planned everything up to the final monster's favor. I didn't know what to ask for her until I actually started writing the scene. She requested to marry the Heroine. It just flowed so naturally that I went with it and based on feedback I've received, it was a good decision. I've had some similar things happen in my writing, twists that even I didn't expect. Sometimes what I have planned changes suddenly because the characters start to take a life of their own and I start writing more of what "They would do" instead of "What I have planned."

 

And just moving a stone has led me to invent a whole load of new stuff just because I researched the area some more ... I'll find out how that affects people as I write.

 

I've never been particularly surprised by any of my stories as I write them. It's more of an ongoing discovery process for me. I start of with such a general and nebulous idea, and when I begin to write, I have a minor "ah ha!" moment, and I add a bit of complexity or depth as a result. Then as time goes on I get more and more of those moments, but I've never been surprised.

 

Someone once told me this little tale about writing that seems germane to share with you all right now.

This happened in the dawning days of science fiction, before the movie deals, before there were formulas to follow, before even the 'three laws of robotics':

There was an author, and he had been very successful financially, creating stories that sold a lot of copies, but one day he comes into his publishers office, and says: "Here's the rough draft of my latest novel."

"Oh?" his editor asks "It wasn't due for another two months, and you rarely make it in on time, let alone early... What happened?"

"I had things all planed out, the whole story line in my head just as I always do, then somewhere in chapter three the characters just rose in revolt and ran away with the story..." The author says perplexed.

"Ah! So, you're finally a writer." His editor smirked.

"Finally? I've written six books: what was I before?" The Author asks.

"A Hack." The Editor replies with an evil grin.

 

For me, I tend to have a VERY rough outline of what I want to do with a story. I'll have a beginning, an end, and a few key events that I want to happen in the middle. When I sit down to write, instead of outlining a scene, I merely start with a basic idea and start to write. I've always been much happier with my own work when its handled this way because the story tells itself instead of me trying to fir the scene into a preconceived frame.

Actually, Simon_Silver's little story sums my perspective on the subject up perfectly.

 

Thank you, thank you, wish I could take credit but supposedly it actually happened, and I heard it from my best friend anyway...

 

When I wrote in the first person it was easy for the character to take over but now writing in the third person I feel as an author that I am fighting my characters to make them do what I want them to do.

Although the way characters think differently is easy to write, I find it really difficult to make a character speak in a clearly individual way (and I have seen enough films to realise that this also a big problem for screenwriters because you often hear the same words and phraseology come out of different mouths) so maybe reverting to dramatic action helps this. Maybe this is why Dickens made a lot of his characters have mannerisms, but that is a kind of cheating.

I have never take on course on creative writing, although I was top of my school, but I have read Christopher Booker's "The Basic Seven Plots" on storytelling. However my natural instinct is to rebel against anything I've been told to do so I think you could make a case for there being almost any number of basic stories form 2 to 20.

 

As I have thought more about the original question I have realized that it does happen to me some times, and not even just when I let the characters seize control of the story: my very first tale on this site: 'Rise Up', I had planed to have be about the son and heir of the patriarch of a post apocalyptic colony: but as I was writing the very first paragraph it morphed into something completely different.

So, no Beeble, it's not just you.

EDIT: Ok, not completely different, but it took a notably more militant and 'adventure' type stance than what I had first planed, which was more 'erotic novel' and less 'sword and planet'...

 

Great question. Yes, I frequently surprise myself. Though I tend to have a general overall plot in my mind when I write a story I love getting into the characters' head and writing as if a table top RPG was going on in my mind with myself being the GM and all the characters. Sometimes the stories take a dramatic turn, yet that excites me because I feel like I am in the mind of the character.

 

I take the RPG stance as well, porneia, being an experienced GM. I set the stage and provide options for the "characters" to explore depending on their moods/backgrounds. Sometimes it goes about as well as I would have figured, but sometimes it ends up in weird places I wouldn't have normally figured these "characters" to go. Sometimes, rarely, I use some of my writing to provide GM encounters, and then use the real players actions to write my stories. Those are pretty cool.

 

Very cool, thanks for the reply. For various reasons I don't engage in table top RPG anymore, but writing gives the same feel. As a former GM I love creating words and NPCs, which writing fiction brings the same opportunity. Chyoo allows me to explore erotic themes which I couldn't really do an RPG setting. There is nothing more erotica, in my opinion, than combining sexuality with an interesting story.

 

You might check out Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts for RPGs with erotic themes/rules written in. However you would want players who would be up for it and you might want to use the X-Card system to allow players to signal for curtailing content which they find difficult and uncomfortable.

 

I often find that I surprise myself, I do like to have some semblance of planning but I feel I am the type of writer who just flows and writes whatever happens and goes with it.

I read an article about it from an author talking about two main types, the planners and freestylers I guess. It's how it sounds, there are writers who plan every detail and stick to it and there are writers who just write and go along with it all.

 

I'm one of those 'freestylers' too, I never really know where a story will end up before I get to that point, I mean I might have some ideas in my head like 'the meeting the character is going to in an hour is with vampires' but if the story changes and demands something different 'poof' goes the vampire scene and suddenly it's with a demon, or a werewolf, or the police.

One bit of advice I got which has really helped me though that I want to share with you all:

If your having trouble just ask yourself, "What's the worst thing I can do to the characters right now that they can get out of by the end of the book?"

That bit of advice is from Louis McMaster Bujold, and it is the best piece of advice I have ever received, whenever I am stuck I ask myself that and 9/10 times it gives me the inspiration I need to continue: but when it doesn't... That kind of block usually takes months to resolve, if it ever does.

 

A more thoughtful version of Raymond Chandler's advice. "When in doubt, have a man enter the room with a gun in his hand." (In erotica I suppose that's a metaphorical gun in one's hand.)

To provide a serious, and dull, answer: not often. I'm more of a thorough pre-planner and know the beats I want to hit ahead of time. The arc between them might be fuzzy, and details might change as things ripple outward, but I can't say I've ever abandoned plot points altogether partway through a story.

 

It happens to me especially then, when I let one of the characters do something I always wanted to do myself. It's kinda like "what would Jesus do?" Only that I just go to my mind and try to think what I would do...and hell I am anything but a saint...

 

Constantly. That's the whole point for me. Unleash primal thoughts and desires on fictional women, then try to get my wife to do a fraction of it. Slow and steady has been winning the race.

 

It's in between set out scenes that i surprise myself. To explain i (like many other people i guess) start my story with either just rough character drafts or rough character drafts + scenes i WANT in my story. While the execution of these scenes is what i wanted them to be most of the time (Adjustements are to be made sometimes) It is the way between these scenes where I develop characters and just writing them as it feels right.

Those are the moments i surprise myself because out of nowhere my character has a side to them even i didn't know about, but which i can then build upon in the future.

 

Constantly surprising myself, I tend to read the prior chapter then try to think of a logical way to continue from there, rarely do I plan the events out first. Often though I find I begin to think and feel as I envisioned the character so if it doesn't feel right to me then it wouldn't to them