posted
I've been sort of blocked on my active WIP (novel), for a few months. I'd been working on other writing projects, just to keep my hand in, but not a word on that one since March. The other night, a character from one of my other projects dropped into my head as I lay trying to sleep, and basically said, "First of all, you're going to write me into your WIP (here's how), and, oh yeah, remember that ending you had planned? Yeah, not so much. I'm going to have to ask you to change the entire direction of the book. Mkay? Great."
The over the next two evenings, I wrote about 7500 words, which changed the entire direction the book was going.
I'm 64k words into the thing, and the story is now headed somewhere completely different, that I hadn't ever considered before.
When my wife read the new stuff, she told me, "The rest of the book is great, but this...this is amazing. Don't change a word of it, and if you have to rewrite the rest of the book to make it fit this, do that."
Wow. So. Ray of inspiration? Finger of the gods?
Has a WIP ever completely jumped the tracks like this (in the space between one breath and the next), but ended up on better tracks, for any of you?
posted
Oh absolutely. Isn't it a great feeling? And it's always started with a character. While I haven't had a character cross over from another book, in my current WIP, one character stole the show. He wants to take over the whole book but I won't let him. For a while, though, I had no idea where he was going with it. He told me what he wanted to do and how he needed to develop. It was all I could do to keep up.
[This message has been edited by annepin (edited September 04, 2008).]
posted
Yeah, aren't moments like that great! I think this is one of the reasons why most of us write...
I had my own WIP novel about 7 years ago. It was later swallowed into the Black Hole known as "my dying hard drive ate it"!
Anyways it had one main character I started with, but a couple hundred pages later another character named "Jan" walked right in and stole the stage.
So much so that that character has dogged my steps ever since, even after that story died in the desert of computer obsolesence...
And I'm happy to say that after a long (5-6 year) absence he's back, albeit in a new story...
So, anyways, my opinion is run with it. If you really hate the way the story is going (or if you find more readers who contradict what your wife said)you can always redo it later...
(And saving lots of copies onto disk or other backup storage device before you radically change it is always advised...)
posted
I had something similar happen. I started a novel my freshman year in high school, and it grew in size and fleshed out over the years, too. But there was one supporting character I just kept trying to develop once he came on the scene. I managed to keep him in the background, though it was difficult, and my mind kept going back to him. I finally gave in and gave him a story of his own. I couldn't believe how easy the novel went down once I started writing it.
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