I get it that sometimes writers have organic process when they’re writing sometime, they start writing one thing and then something else. Is there one particular character, situation in the story where as you were writing it, it kind of evolved on its own, kind of surprised you, if you don’t mind, could you tell us about it?
So… there are always things when you’re writing that evolve beyond what you expect of them to be, and it happens even to the most strict of outliners. And I do, even as I usually call myself an outliner, say that you shouldn’t be too strict about the outline. Just because the more- What happens with the writers, the more you steep yourself in your story, the more your subconscious will start to make connections and the more your skill as a writer will start to, uhm, start to take over? It’s hard to explain a lot of why it is, but a similar in… honestly, like hitting a baseball, right? When you, when you’re practicing, you can be very conscious about it. “Alright, here’s how my stance should be, here’s what I’m doing wrong, let’s work on that”, consciously. But in the moment when you’re, like, swinging at the ball in the game, most of that’s out of your head and you’re just letting instinct go. The planning is all of that sort of stuff beforehand that you do, like a baseball player, and then the writing often involves a lot more of the “just swinging”, and then the revision goes back to more, a lot more conscious, if that… makes sense as an explanation. And so as you’re going, a lot of time it’s the instincts that start going somewhere, you’ll get this chapter and say “huh, something’s wrong with this”, or “oh, this is a better path, let’s go look at my outline and see what needs to be rebuilt.” Uhm, some examples of this, if I can give them… uh, well, I mean, I write the Alcatraz books completely just as free-written books, but in books you’ve read, for instance, Spook’s story in Hero of Ages was not in the original outline. Uhm, you know, what happened to him and things like that in Well of Ascension was, and then I was like, um, I want to take this character further and feel like I need more to this story, I’m missing something and Spook’s story is where I started taking that. So that was a more natural, uh, sort of outgrowth of the storytelling. But that happens in every book, there are certain things that’ll… that go off target a little bit and turn out to be better. Yeah, there’s a target that you’re at that your subconsciousness is leading for[?] that your consciousness doesn’t know about yet… uhm, yeah, it happens every book.
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