Corners, Drafts, and Darlings
One of my favorite things about writing the way I do - without a plan or an outline - is that I routinely write my characters into corners just to see what they do. I am a worst case scenario thinker. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t - especially at three in the morning when I’d rather be sleeping but my brain is asking me what I would do if... In any case, it does translate pretty well into stories. What lengths will this character or that character go to to make things right. For me, it makes it interesting. And it almost always takes place in my zero drafts. In reality, my zero draft is more of a really fleshed out outline. If an outline can be 40000 - 60000 words. There is a lot missing in that first draft but there are a lot of things that get cut out too. More often than not, the corners get cut first. A - because they tend to be really outlandish B - because they do nothing to push the story forward or C - because they give too much of my characters away. I’ll keep the ones that highlight important flaws or redeem them in some way. Some of them I keep in a special folder I have for my personal darlings - those ones that say a whole lot more about me than my characters.
I didn’t always write this way. I’ve always been a seat of the pants kind of writer but I used to play it a lot safer with my characters. I didn’t want to push too much, to see what they were really made of. I got called on it by a teacher of mine. She was a really good teacher when I first met her, at least for me. Later, she would be much less so, when for whatever reason, the bottle held more draw than the classroom. She used to write on the edges of my paper about watered down conflicts and that my characters, like actual people, would never grow or develop if I protected them from everything. She challenged me to write something that let them be better than that. Now, I try very hard to do that in all my stories and most times, I think they’re better for it.
Now, regardless of whether or not I keep my darling corners, I love them. I’ll write them into a corner thinking I’m writing one story only discover that I’m really writing a different story when they make it, by hook or by crook, out of the corner and through the door. Almost always, my stories are better for it. Always, I understand my characters better. They become like real people to me which seems silly maybe but I can’t help it. There are some characters of mine who I know better than I think I know even myself.