There comes a point in almost every book I write when one of my characters becomes inconvenient.
I have a plan. There are notes. Occasionally there is even something resembling an outline.
Then I reach the scene, put the character in it, and realize there is absolutely no chance this person will do what I planned for them to do.
Which is rude, considering I invented them.
But somewhere between creating a character and actually writing them, something changes.
At first, they’re a collection of decisions. A name. An age. A history. Maybe a few personality traits and a general idea of what they want. I decide what they’re afraid of, what they’ve survived, what they love, and what they’ll spend the next few hundred pages trying very hard not to admit they need.
Then I start writing.
And eventually, all those individual pieces stop feeling like decisions I made and start behaving like parts of the same person.
That’s usually when my carefully constructed plans begin to fall apart.
Because once I know a character well enough, I can tell when I’m making them do something simply because the plot needs it.
They wouldn’t forgive that quickly.
They wouldn’t walk away.
They wouldn’t stay quiet.
They definitely wouldn’t have that conversation calmly, no matter how convenient it would be for the next chapter.
So the scene changes.
Sometimes a chapter changes with it. Occasionally an entire section of the book gets dragged along for the ride.
I used to think this meant I had planned badly.
Now I think it usually means the character is finally working.
There’s a difference between allowing characters to derail a story for no reason and recognizing when the person you’ve created has developed an internal logic of their own. Their history should affect how they respond. Their fears should matter. Their relationships should change them. The things they’ve survived shouldn’t disappear simply because behaving differently would make the plot easier to write.
If I’ve spent two hundred pages showing a reader who someone is. I can’t suddenly ask that reader to forget it all because I really like something I wrote in an outline three months ago.
The outline doesn’t have to be the ending.
The reader does.
And sometimes that means deleting a scene I loved, rewriting a conversation, or admitting that the beautiful little plan I made before I truly knew these people no longer fits them.
It can be increasingly annoying.
It can also lead to some of my favourite moments in a book
Because the scene I didn’t plan is often more honest than the one I did.
That’s one of my favourite parts of writing fiction. There’s a strange point where creating a character stops feeling like assembling one and starts feeling like discovering one. I still control the keyboard. I still decide what ultimately stays on the page.
But the question changes.
It stops being What do I need this character to do?
And becomes: Given everything I know about this person, what would they actually do?
Usually, the answer causes considerably more trouble.
Which, frankly, is also rude.
But those tend to be the characters worth following.
— L.A. Keane
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