Many
authors say when they start to write a story that the characters take
over and dictate what happens. When I first started writing, I
thought that sounded ridiculous. I knew what I wanted to write. I
even had the last chapter or last paragraph worked out in my mind for
many of those stories.
But
lo and behold, when I look back on many of my stories, the saying
seems to be true. Very seldom do I end up with the story I had in my
mind. I don’t know how it happens. I create characters and think I
know them but when I get inside their minds, something happens. They
become real, living people and don’t act or react the way I thought
they would.
One
example of this is my short story Nicholas in my booklet The
Doorbell Rang. Originally, I had intended for
Nicholas to be a rather unlikable guy and my lead female character was
going to kill him in the end. That didn’t happen at all. Whether
Nicholas turned out to be a likable guy, only readers can decide. But
the ending to that story was in my very humble opinion, the best I’ve
ever written. In fact, the story I wrote (or rather the characters
wrote) bore no resemblance to the story that circulated in my head
for years.
In
that same booklet, the three other stories also had twists and turns
that I had not envisioned when I was planning them. The first story
Margarita took root when I was in my twenties after living in Mexico
for a couple of years. When I finally wrote it years later, Margarita
herself completely fooled me as did characters I hadn’t imagined in
the beginning. Over all, the story is one of my favorites out of all
I’ve written.
In
my first published romance novel, A Caribbean
Summer, I daydreamed about that story for
years, even before I went to the Caribbean where I lived for four
years. Nothing in my life happened that resembled that daydream. But
when I started to write it years later, again the characters became
real with minds of their own. And I let them dictate to me what was
happening.
In
The Chameleon Chase I
had the beginning worked out but not the rest of the story. Luckily,
my characters took over and the book became one of my favorites.
This
has happened over and over. But I feel lucky in that my characters
seem to be smarter than I am and can create stories better than those
in my head.
