When Characters Take Over the Plot, Let Them

A playwright hands the actors a finished script, and two weeks into rehearsal one of them stops on a line and says, “She wouldn’t say that.” The playwright can argue. Or the playwright can listen, because the actor has spent two weeks living inside that woman and has found something the script missed. Good playwrights rewrite the line.

Novelists get the same note, except it comes from inside their own heads. A character you’ve written for a hundred pages starts to push back against the outline. She won’t make the choice you planned for her in chapter fourteen, because by chapter nine she’d become someone who never would. Writers call it the characters taking over, and it sounds mystical, even a little crazy, to anyone who doesn’t write fiction.

It isn’t crazy. When I write fiction, my characters take over to a certain extent.

Each one gains its own personality and its own arc, and I follow them. Sometimes those arcs override the plot, and I let them.

Do characters take over a novel?

Ask any room full of novelists and you’ll hear it in a dozen versions. A creative writing group on Facebook asked whether people plan everything or discover the story alongside their characters, and the same joke came back again and again. I planned it all, then my characters said “screw this” and did what they wanted. My characters looked at the plan, thought it was cute and derailed the plot. A crime writer planned a trilogy, and his lead had other ideas, so he finished book four and started book five.

Those are jokes, and they’re also accurate reports from the inside of the work.

Nobody believes a fictional person is typing. What the writers are describing is a character who has become consistent enough that some plot moves feel false the moment you try to write them.

I’ve asked authors about this on my podcast, and they keep saying yes. Catherine Meyrick, who writes historical fiction, told me about a character named George who wasn’t in her plan at all, showed up larger than life and became central to the story.

Her view: when something isn’t working, it’s often because you’re forcing it into what you think it should be, and you need to listen to what the characters want to do.

Stephen Oram plans his science fiction in detail and still lets the characters wander off when staying true to them demands it. He said they should.

Watch: Writing Strong Characters - The Important Distinction Between Want and Need, Think Story

What’s really going on when a character refuses the plot?

A character is a set of rules. What she wants, what she fears, what she’d never do, how she talks when she’s angry and how she lies when she’s cornered. The first time you write her, those rules are thin. By the middle of the book you’ve written her in forty situations, and the rules have hardened into a person.

The outline was written before any of that happened. It was written by a version of you who didn’t know her yet.

So when chapter fourteen asks her to forgive the man who betrayed her, and everything she’s done for thirteen chapters says she’d burn his house down first, the scene won’t come. You can type the words. They just read like a puppet show.

That resistance is information. The part of your brain that’s been tracking her for a hundred pages is telling you the plan is wrong.

I described this to Suzanna Linton in one of those interviews: sometimes I want to go in one direction, the character seems to want to go in another, and the writing becomes awful until I fix that. She’d hit the same wall with one of her novels. She was trying to force the character, and once she let the character go where it wanted, she finished the book and the writing got easier.

How I outline and still let characters lead

None of this means I skip the outline. I outline every novel, and then I write the book. My method is the one I call the ink blot method: five or as many as ten major plot points, like drops of ink on paper, and I write outward from each one until the chapters meet. I usually know my ending, too. I often write it first, very loosely, and then work forward. By the time I get there it’s changed, but at least I know where I’m headed.

The characters do their growing in the spaces between the drops. In those spaces they pick up the habits, the grudges, the turns of phrase and the private loyalties that I never planned. And sometimes one of them grows right through a plot point and makes it impossible.

When that happens, I go back to the outline and move the drop. The ending usually survives. The route there changes. Say a betrayal planned for the brother turns out to belong to the best friend, because the brother’s arc has made him the one person in the book who would never do it. The plot gets better, because now it comes out of who these people are.

I love twisty plots, and most of my fiction has plot twists, often several. You’d think a writer who plans twists would hold characters on a short leash. It works the other way. A twist only lands when the reader looks back and sees it was set up all along, and the setup lives in character. If my character has grown into somebody who’d make that choice, the twist plays fair. If I force her into it, the reader feels cheated, and they’d be right.

I wrote more about that in how to write a plot twist readers never see coming.

When should a writer overrule the character?

Sometimes the character is wrong. Or the writer has the character wrong. The character “refuses” a plot point because the writer got lazy, slid into writing every scene in the same mood, and flattened a complicated person into a single note. A character who is nothing but angry will refuse every scene that needs her to be anything else.

Check that first. Go back and read her chapters cold. Is she refusing because of who she is, or because you’ve only ever written one side of her?

If she’s been consistent and rich and the plot point violates her, change the plot. If she’s been one-dimensional and the plot point needs her to show a side you never wrote, the fix is earlier in the book. Plant that side of her in chapter four, and chapter fourteen stops being a lie.

Genre matters too. A mystery has to deliver a solution that plays fair, a romance has to deliver its ending, and a thriller has to keep the clock running. A character can change how the book gets there. She doesn’t get to swap in a different kind of book. If a romance lead decides she doesn’t want the guy after all, the writer has a choice to make, and “follow the character” doesn’t settle it alone.

Series writers have it hardest, because a published character’s history is locked and readers notice when the next book ignores it.

Should you stick to the outline no matter what?

Some writing teachers say yes. Clare Flynn told me about a session where an outlining advocate was asked what to do when the story pulls you in another direction mid-draft. The answer was don’t do it: stick with the outline, finish the book, then go write the other book. Clare disagreed with that, and so do I. When the story pulls you somewhere else, there’s a very good reason, and it’s often the characters.

I hate that advice.

It treats the outline as the boss and the writer as a typist, and it produces exactly the kind of novel where everything happens on schedule and nobody seems alive. You can feel those books on the page. Every character does what the plot needs, right when the plot needs it, and you don’t believe a word of it. Who wants to read that book?

The opposite mistake is just as real. A writer with no outline at all, following every character down every side road, ends up with four hundred pages of interesting people and no story. The plotter versus pantser fight misses this, I think. The outline gives you somewhere to go. The characters tell you how they’d get there.

How do you know a character is ready to take over?

Ask what the character would do, and see if you know the answer without thinking. Stephen Oram described his version as walking around wondering what they’d do, the way you’d wonder what a friend would do in a mess.

When you can answer that instantly, and the answer surprises you a little, the character is alive.

Another sign is dialogue that arrives already written. You stop composing a character’s lines and start taking them down. That’s the moment a character can start pushing back, and it’s a good moment, because flat characters never push back on anything.

The warning sign runs the other way. If every character goes along with every plot point and you never feel any resistance, they’re props. Characters with real wants and real arcs are a craft of their own, covered in Creating Character Arcs and in my piece on plot-driven and character-driven stories.

The playwright who rewrites the line after the actor says “she wouldn’t say that” finds out what his play is about, and he keeps control of it. Keep the outline, keep the ending in sight, and when a character tells you she won’t do it, believe her and change the scene. More on character and structure is in the Writing Hub, and if you’re stuck in a manuscript where the people and the plot are fighting, that’s the kind of problem my writing coaching sorts out.

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