Letting a Story Evolve

When I first started writing about Lucinda, the female protagonist of The Wanderer series, I gave her a love interest, Lord Stephen, and then I gave him a personal bodyguard named Simon.

Originally I thought I would give Simon a love interest of his own in one of the books of the series, and I even wrote a draft of that novel.

But it’s always best to let a story evolve in a way that honors the story and the characters rather than stubbornly sticking to a script. As the series evolved, I began to see Simon as someone very different from what I had originally imagined with a background and goals unlike Lucinda’s and Stephen’s.

Because I wanted to show a little about how cultures influence each other, I made him non-Sige. He’s a black character from a different continent (this was not unknown even in the early Middle Ages in Europe). Because I let go of my preconceived ideas of who he was going to be and what his role would become, I was able to give him a more nuanced and layered character and this, I think, adds a lot of emotional power to the series.

This is one of the reasons why, when people talk about pantser versus plotter in writing, I always say that being a pantser will lead you in direction that being a plotter just can’t.

Being a plotter is probably a good idea if you’re writing a clearly defined series with the same mostly unchanging protagonist and situation from one book to the next (think Lee Child’s Reacher series).

In these cases, the author is delivering on reader expectations and its worthwhile to avoid spending a lot of time going down unprofitable rabbit holes.

But for me, writing is more about the process of exploration, and I’m not trying to keep ten million readers happy. I’m trying to keep me happy, as it were, and for that reason, letting a story go in a different direction from what I expected is a delightful part of the process. It helps keep me from feeling that I’m just repeating myself. And I think it leads to stories that aren’t formulaic in a way they might otherwise be.