Here’s some screenshots of a few of tweets I made yesterday evening.
Now, couple of things to note here. First and foremost, I’ve finished chapter twelve of A Tortured Soul and the word count is now up of 50,000. Which is good. Second, and perhaps more interestingly, the story has taken a turn I didn’t originally plan. Oh, the main thrust of the plot hasn’t changed – the end point is still the same, but how I get there seems to have taken a detour. And this detour is completely down to the characters in the book.
Here’s the thing, if a writer is doing a half-decent job and making his characters believable, then those characters will inevitably start to ‘talk’ to him. One of the reasons, or perhaps the main reason, that my books contain more dialogue than description is because all I’m doing most of the time is transcribing the conversations that my characters are having in my head. I almost feel like a voyeur most of the time, snooping in on their lives.
So while I have a clear idea of what the major plot points of my novel are and how to get from one to the next, my characters sometimes disagree, and go off in a different direction entirely.
Thankfully, while they might end up taking a different path to get there, I’ve yet to have a set of characters that have refused to hit one of major plot points. Oh, I’ve had a couple that have tried to bypass the odd one, but I’ve always managed to pull them back into line eventually. And I’m hoping that this is what happens here. The path that Paul and co seem to want to walk feels like a natural one. I just hope it gets me where I need them o be and I don’t end up having to re-think and re-plot the rest of this book.
I can but hope.
