When Characters Take Over

Don’t you just love it when a story starts to really come together? You’ve poked and prodded, written and erased, put them all through hell (and they’ve often returned the favor), and all of a sudden

everythingtakesoffanddemandstobewrittenNOW!

Characters start drumming their fingernails on the tabletop, clearing their throats, or tapping impatient toes. It’s not so bad when the character is sane and relatively normal (at least as normal as any character that is the spawn of my brain), but when said character is a little, shall we say, unbalanced, they tend to do a lot of taking over.

They take over my thoughts, and my conversations. My roommate is getting tired of listening to me tell her what the next step is for these characters. She insists she’d rather read it than listen to me talk about it (although I think the word she used wasn’t “talk”; it was more like “prattle” or “ramble”).

But the characters make it all worth while, and when one of them makes an unexpected, yet logical and perfectly timed entrance, then there isn’t much left to do but write it.

And so I must.

What about you? What drives your writing? Is it interesting characters, or a plot that soars?

-Karen-