Runaway Characters

I’m so close to finishing Scribbling The Eternal, the sequel to The Scribbled Victims, but I’ve hit a wall and her name is Mirela Cobalcescu. She’s begun behaving in ways I didn’t see coming. 

Let me explain. When I write, I don’t write completely alone. My characters do a lot of the writing for me. They do the things they want to do and say the things they want to say. Sure I created them but from there my job is mostly to place them in situations and then allow them to be true to themselves. This is especially the case for the character of Orly Bialek–I just let her go and she does her own thing. I’ve gotten a lot of comments about how unpredictable and irrational Orly is, and that makes me happy because it tells me that, on the page, she is just being herself. 

But in this new book, I feel Mirela’s behavior is making me lose the directional control of the story and I’ve been struggling to find a way back to the situations I planned to have her and the other characters face. It’s been very difficult for me mentally because I thought I was so close to finishing the full draft, but now I think it could take weeks if not months more to complete, which will mean a later release date than I planned. 

Maybe it will sound strange to you, but I need to talk to Mirela alone and find out what she really wants so I can figure out a way to steer this story back on course. 

If you write fiction, stage plays, or screenplays, do you approach writing in a similar way? Do you interact with your characters and give them the freedom to be who they want to be rather than who you want them to be?  

-Robert Tomoguchi