Opinions on Writing

I've just written a scene in my latest WIP that makes me wonder about the evolution of characters. How they start on a page with one fairly distinct personality, but within a scene can suddenly embody a person that you actually know, or just appear in a slightly different light than the one in which you had originally viewed your character.

I think I'm going to state that this is a good thing. Suddenly you have this character on a page that you are going to get to know. While you are on the train, you might hear his or her opinion to something that you are seeing out the window, and you might have a little bit of a chuckle. Sure, the people in the seats around you might think you are crazy, but you know that you are just a writer. And that this is the way that things just happen to us sometimes. ;)

Things like this signal, at least to me, that the characters you have chosen, out of all the possible choices, are the right ones, and that, like real people, they are multi-faceted. They should be. I like it when my characters do something that surprises me. Sure, in the next moment I then have to get out my notes and figure out how I'm going to suit any future scenes I may have in mind to suit this new character development, but yeah, overall, it's a good thing.


Likewise, I like to have the ending of my stories kept from me until I am very near the end. This sounds really silly to some people, because how can you write a story when you don't know how it's going to end, right? Wrong. At least for me, it is. I have a vague idea, maybe three main plot points through the story that I know I'm going to have to cover, but the very end result to come out of these things? That's as much a mystery to me as to the reader. At least I hope so. I like to think that my stories do not have predictable endings.


Nikki Watson.