Search This Blog

Monday, April 25, 2011

Letting My Characters Show Me The Way

I have been writing the sequel to my book Eye Contact for some time now. Its not unexpected that it would take some time for me to write this one. Eye Contact is a long book, over 90,000 words, and Embraced is shaping up to long as well.

But, recently, I stumbled with it. I reached a place and I thought, hmmm, I have no idea where to go from here. A lot of you writers out there are what they refer to as 'plotters,' meaning that you work out all of your plot kinks before you ever write word one on the page. I am not. I am what is referred to as a 'pantser' meaning I write by the seat of my pants. LOL. When I stumbled this time, I actually considered sitting down and making an outline for this book.

But I stopped myself.

Why?

Because after all of this time, my muse and I are quite familiar with each other. The second I have worked out all of the plot twists and turns of a book, my muse moves on to other things. If I work out the plot before I have written it, I almost never write the book. It's just not that interesting to my creative side anymore.

So what did I do? Well, I decided to start writing the next chapter just to see what would happen. I pushed through and the most unexpected thing happened: the plot altered a great deal from what I had expected and the book changed into something so different than it had been and so much better.

My characters told me what was supposed to happen in their story.

Now it is like I can't write fast enough. My hands are moving a mile a minute and my head wont shut down. I am thrilled.

Happy Monday everyone. I wish you a wonderful week of writing and reading!

No comments:

Post a Comment