Yipes, they are alive!

As I wrote earlier, I am working on a book of short stories right now. It is my first attempt to do so since I normally write novels. A curious thing happened today as I was working on one story. I was at the coffee shop I go to and came to a place in my story that was a dead-end. I had no idea where to go from there. I went and got a sandwich and a cup of coffee and thought about it. No dice. I had no idea what I was going to do. I even considered throwing out the story except I liked it.

When I worked on novels, I always knew where the book was going. I didn't always know the middle but I knew where it would end up. With the short stories I was writing, I did not. I don't read this form of fiction often. I had just finished a small book of short stories by W. Somerset Maugham that I read the first time when I was a young teen. I was surprised how much I had changed since I first read them many years ago. I still enjoyed them, but I saw different things in them than I did not the first time. I thought, for instance, that many points of irony hinged on a female character more than male characters and that during the time in the mid-twentieth century many authors did more than use women characters in their plots to move things along. They blamed them for a whole variety of things. I think I did that as well in my own stories of that time. Things have changed, thank goodness. I have too.\

Today I looked at my plot and my female protagonist and I had no idea what she was going to do. In a way, she was up against some of the same issues many women were up against in Maugham's stories. She was up against the wall and had no place, no direction that I could think she could go. I was stymied. Well, I was writing in long hand as I do when I am not in my apartment with the laptop. I just put my pen on the paper and let it go where it may because the other choice was to start another story and give up on this one.

I was astonished when the characters just took off and did their own thing. I just followed them recording what was said and what they did and in a very competent manner they finished the story in a way that I liked. In a sense, I also trusted them.

Maybe I had been trying to push the characters around and not allowing them to be who they were. That sounds a bit odd, but I have heard other writers say their fictional characters take a life of their own. I had done my job by giving them their characteristics and the setting for the story. I don't even like pit bulls but one came onto the scene and I dutifully recorded him as he walked outside through the doggie door looking for biscuits and occasionally lying in the sun.

Of course, the story was being done in my head. Who else is up there? Still, all this ability to plan, plot and create did not happen in a vacuum. It was being done effortlessly. I have been writing stories in my head since I was a little girl. Many writers have. I would watch a movie and "improve" it by rearrange the film or read a novel and change it to make it better or just write stories from scratch in my head.

My mother would call it daydreaming. It was fun to do especially on those long walks to and from school, the library, bus stops and so forth. I was a solitary person who lived in a very dysfunctional family. Walking was the only way I could get out of the house and way from the fighting that went on especially when my father had too much to drink. I thought all of that daydreaming was wasted. Not so.

Now it seems, my characters may have lives of their own. I am anxious to let them "loose" again in my next story.