J. R. R. Tolkien once said, “I have long ceased to invent. I wait till I seem to know what really
happened. Or till it writes itself.”
Writing is a strange, strange occupation sometimes. It often seems to be discovery more than
creation, as if we’re meeting characters and recording their adventures rather than dreaming them
up. The result is the sometimes startling situation of sitting at the keyboard and having a
character do or say something entirely unexpected. In fact, my current work-in-progress, a light-
hearted story called The Accidental Magician about someone meddling in the realm of the Fae,
just did this to me. The main character, Carla Kellogg, is turning out to be considerably different
than I’d first imagined her. She started out being serious, perhaps even a bit bland, but as I’ve
gotten to know her I’ve discovered she’s edgier, snarkier, and way funnier than I’d thought—a
little like a science nerd version of Eleanor Shellstrop from The Good Place.
Sometimes the change is more dramatic still. Marig Kastella in The Chains of Orion started out as nothing more than the main character’s love interest, and then turned around and basically took over the last half of the book. I won’t give you any spoilers, but I will say that if you read this story—I had no idea any of that stuff was going to happen to him when I started writing the story. His trajectory turns out to be nothing short of mindblowing. As a result, he’s one of my favorite characters I’ve ever written.
But the only way I can describe it is that Carla and Marig said to me, “No, that’s not who I am. This is who I am. Get it right, for cryin’ out loud.”
In my experience when these unexpected twists occur, it means something is going very right
with the story. As far as where this sort of thing comes from—whether it’s my own rather
byzantine brain at work, or that there’s a Collective Unconscious I’m somehow tapping into—I
honestly don’t know. All I can say is what it feels like—that the characters already existed, and
I’m writing down their story as I learn about it from them.
One thing’s for certain, though. It only happens when I’ve committed myself to getting in front
of the keyboard every day, prepping myself for receiving these bolts of creativity when they
come. As biologist Louis Pasteur put it, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”
