The Magic of Unplanned Writing

I've been writing on and off for a long time, lots of little stories, stories that were never finished, and stories that are still tucked away as ideas in a secret folder (I say secret but not exactly well hidden. It just sits on my desktop, tempting me away from whatever I'm currently working on). When these ideas strike is always exciting, and the impulse is always to chase these ideas and see where they lead.

The problem with chasing these stories in the past has been that whatever I was then working on would inevitably get lost in the wayside. I've gotten a hell of a lot better about it though, which has resulted in me getting a lot further into the novel I'm currently working on, and some of these ideas for other stories have fed back into the novel so it's all good (Of course it's also meant my ideas folder has been filling up a lot quicker, but hopefully that'll come in handy later!).

But anyway, one thing I've discovered through getting so far in my current book is how much fun the unplanned things can be. As the characters begin to develop and grow they start to fill in the story much more than I planned. Certain elements of my story have been dropped as I've written more and found out that the characters, as they've grown and become more developed, don't want to do some of the things I want to (they're like unruly children that way). There's been many occasions where what I've intended to happen in a given scene has completely changed while writing it.


One example of this I can think of happening recently was when my main character meets a friend of his in hospital after an accident (I won't go too much into what happened, spoilers and all that) but what was originally just a scene where he goes to check on him, and would eventually lead to the main character getting a certain bit of information, ended up with the characters diverting into a story from their childhood. I had no plans for this little story (I hadn't even imagined that anything like it happened), but when characters start wanting to drive your story, and tell their own stories, it's nothing but good. That scene ended up sounding much more natural than it would otherwise have, and ended up showing what kind of relationship these two characters have.

The most important thing I'm discovering about how to write characters well and more realistically, is that you can plan the story all you want, but if your character's don't want to do the things you'd like, then you can either force them into it, and end up with a sub-par story, or follow where they lead and you just might be lucky enough to find something good at the end of the trail.