Have you ever been working on a story and ended up someplace you didn’t want to go?
I’ve heard lots of “didn’t expect that” stories from other authors, and even had a few myself. But I don’t generally hear “the story went someplace I don’t want to go,” despite the fact that it does happen. This is one of those dirty little secrets authors don’t often share with each other. Writer’s block is easy to admit to. Going “off the rails” is another thing that people say. Admitting that the story went someplace we didn’t want it to go, though, is hard because this means the story touched a nerve and possibly got darker or nastier than we expected.
Authors, like everyone else, have certain lines they will not cross. Some authors don’t like writing about sex. Some authors have issues with guns. I even know one author who can write about assassins but will not write about assassinations. That one threw me for a bit of a loop, but IMHO, every author has the right to decide what (s)he will and won’t write. I also believe that when a story ends up crossing that line, straying into unintended territory, there’s a reason it did so.
Story strays can happen for a variety of reasons. The most common reason is lack of a defined plot: the author has a beginning, and perhaps an ending, but no structure for the middle, which means the path between A and Z is a zig-zagged winding path that wanders off on any tangential thought that crosses the author’s brain.
But story strays happen for other reasons, too. One year I found myself writing nothing but tragedy. It wasn’t until later that I understood these stories came out of a particularly rough patch IRL. Writing has always been my pressure-release value and lets me deal with stress in a constructive way. Writing is my “drug” of choice. Who needs artificial mood enhancers when finishing a story, and getting the story accepted by a publisher, floods my brain with a plethora of pleasure-inducing endorphins? On the other hand, the emotional roller coaster ride can be a bit hard on the body.
This is the reason, though, that I believe stories go where authors need them to go. If we have an outline, or at least a relatively structured path from A to Z, then there is no reason why story strays should happen unless something is happening in our lives that needs addressed. When our characters rebel against us, when events spiral out of control to a place that was never on the plotsheet, it’s because our brains are warning us about a problem. It could be something as simple as a plot hole that we forgot to fill (i.e., protagonist refusing to fix the problem because more people will die than if he leaves things as they are – which really did happen to me), or it could be an event IRL that we as real life people need to deal with. The best example I can think of is related to acting, not writing, but the parallels are the same. About twenty+ years ago, a soap-opera actress working with her character’s child abuse plotline actually had to resign from the show because (as it turns out) she’d forgotten that she actually had been abused as a child IRL by a relative. The script hit her hard, bringing up all sorts of repressed memories and caused a personal crisis that she needed to deal with someplace other than in front of the camera.
When our stories take us places we don’t want to go, when our minds balk at character actions or unexpected events, when we quit writing a story because it crosses a line that we don’t want to cross, we owe it to ourselves to discover why. We don’t have to continue writing the stories (though in some cases, it may help some people), and we certainly don’t have to publish these stories. But we do need to find out why we’ve drawn these lines in the sand, why we as authors do not want to discuss these situations in a fictional setting. Because if we don’t gain that understanding, chances are another story will take that same path, that we will (whether or not our conscious mind wants to) end up walking the same path until we get to the end of it. When the subconscious is screaming at the top of it’s non-existent lungs, it’s doing so because it needs to be heard.
So the next time your story goes someplace you don’t want to go, sit down for a bit and find out why. Have a talk with your characters. Look at the plot and the story as written. Find out the point where it went off the rails and see if you can understand why. Then take a deep breath and remember that you are not the only one who’s been here. We may not talk about it in public, but a lot of us have seen this abyss. The abyss is different for every one of us, but our experiences are similar.
