On Losing Control, or The Thanksgiving 2015 Descent into Madness

NOTE: I'm going to attempt to write this post without spoilers for Wide Horizons or anything else, but no promises that I won't slip. I get kind of excited when I talk about writing. :)

November 26, 2015. Somewhere around 4 am. It's the wee hours of Thanksgiving morning, and I've been up all night getting in as many NaNoWriMo words as I can before the Thanksgiving family stuff starts later that morning. I just finished a crucial scene in Wide Horizons (2015's NaNo novel) and am attempting to rest on my laurels for a moment.

And then, things go off the rails.

Whoa, whoa, Protag, rewind. Lemme get this straight: you want to change who the romantic interest in this story is going to be. Is that right? We're FORTY-TWO THOUSAND words in--just FIVE DAYS left in the month--and I have spent literally YEARS working out how I was going to arrange for you and Romantic Interest to get together, and now you want to switch to someone else?
WHY ARE YOU JUST TELLING ME THIS NOW?!?!

You're right, I should've seen this coming. This is what happens when you stay up all night trying to get all the NaNoWriMo words in before Thanksgiving festivities start.

The heart wants what it wants. The more you try to push people together, the harder they will push back, and the more you try to force people apart, well, we know how it goes.

The real kicker here is that I wasn't trying to push people together or force them apart. I had Protag, Romantic Interest, and RI's Sibling, and they were all three thoroughly happy in their roles: Protag and RI's relationship was based on mutual trust and respect (I've spent years--literal YEARS--sorting out the details of what scenes I'd have to bring them together), and Protag and Sib were becoming great friends. And then...Sib started taking over. SIB IS COMPLETELY OUT OF CONTROL! AND PROTAG IS COMPLETELY OK WITH THIS!

It wasn't the first time I've lost control of my own fictional characters (Will from Walls did have that moment where he rode, unplanned, into the story and announced he was going to be one of the main characters, and Sam turned Nixie from what was going to be a straight-up retelling of Grimm's "The Nixie of the Mill-Pond" into a story about growing up and childhood friendships), but it was to date the most dramatic, and it sent me reeling.

I didn't set out to make Wide Horizons the story it ended up being, and the characters involved in the story's romantic subplot surprised me. But after I finished throwing my Thanksgiving day hissy fit about "Sibling" usurping the role of romantic interest, getting a good night's sleep, and thinking through the implications of this new direction, I realized that it was going to be all right.

Bill Nye said it was going to be OK, so it must be true!

More than all right, in fact: I had tripped on the perfect way to tie the story's romantic subplot into the series' overarching themes about faith and free will. This was an unexpected revelation for the entire White Stone series, and it has led me to a conclusion I probably should've had years ago.

​Losing control of your characters isn't a bad thing. It can be alarming (see above Facebook post), but it can often lead to something you'd never thought about before. After you stop panicking about what the change is going to mean for everything for the rest of forever, you often find the direction the characters are trying to go really is the right one.

(Not always. Pazur from White Stone once thought it'd be a good idea to make a sexual pass at Kalima. That was not the right direction to go, now was it, Pazur?)

(I'm still a little salty about losing the argument I had with him about that scene, and I still like to remind him that I told him so every once in a while.)

So go ahead. Lose control of your characters. It might be the best thing that could happen to your story!