When Will My Characters Stop Corrupting My Plots??!

I'm participating in nanowrimo this year. For those who aren't aware what that stands for, it's National Novel Writing Month. The idea is that you generate a novel of 50,000 words inside of the month of November. Now frankly, a 50,000 word novel isn't likely to get published, the minimum length that's usually taken seriously is 80,000 or more words, but it's a good start, and it's a realistic goal. As a writer who has already been published, I don't really need to do something like this. The usual procedure is to outline a book, write the first three chapters, and then have your agent shop it around for you.

Except I have no agent. Hmm, maybe that's the subject for another blog entry.

So this novel I'm writing is a heroic tale set in the post apocalyptic world. Set fifty years after a nuclear war, it deals with a fairly commonly used plot device: robot invasion. Without giving too much away about the novel, since I know that my hordes of adoring readers will be rushing out to get this novel once it's made available (and it will be made available in one form or another), I can say that the story begins with our hero in action, and then the story morphs into a struggle against a robot army that has decided to bring order to the world by imposing the will of its leader upon those who inhabit the post-nuke wasteland.

Again, without giving too much away, there are some themes running through this thing, such as what happens when you have bad leadership in charge of civilization (whether it be large or small is of no consequence), whether civilization is even worth rebuilding, friendship, loyalty, and of course, the nature of heroics.

Now I'm planning on the final novel length being somewhere around 80,000 words. I'm currently at about 20,000 words, and I anticipate being at 30,000 words very soon. What's interesting is that through the course of exploring the story (without an outline. Yes, I know, writers must always work from an outline!), the real plot of the book hasn't even come into focus. In fact, other than the introduction of a character in the very beginning, and then vaguely hinting at the fact that he's now mixed up with the heroes, there's really been no hint of that plot line surfacing.

I do know how this thing will progress, and approximately when things will set the major plot of the novel in motion, but it's already farther into the novel than I expected for the big event to take place.

And that brings up a point. Characters in novels don't seem to follow the author's plans all that often. It's almost like you can't force your characters to do anything they don't want to do. Sure, you know they will do certain things because it's in their characters, and because you wouldn't have a novel if they don't, but they also seem to have their own agenda that has nothing to do with anything you planned.

In this novel I'm writing, they decided to pull a fast one on me. Rather than simply plunging into the story as expected, they decided that since the town they lived in had become so corrupt, they wanted to retake the old family farm and start a new community there. OK, no problems there, until the corrupt dude in charge of the town figures out their little plan and decides to derail it. Now here I am, twenty thousand words into this thing (or seventy pages, for those who keep track more of page count) and they're fighting with this corrupt town. It's almost the plot of a western, and if it weren't for the fact that there is a larger story to tell that includes some really fantastic elements, I could probably set the entire novel around this first conflict that I hadn't even planned in the first place.

Why is it that characters tend to derail your stories? Of course am I really complaining about this? The fact is that I think I'm covering some interesting ground here, and this episode should add to the overall enjoyability of the novel.

Ah well, maybe next time I'll tackle the concept of procrastination in writing, which this blog entry certainly qualifies as, though some would call it a warm-up in preparation of the actual writing. In either case, I have 5,000 words to knock out today if I want to hit my goal of 50,0000 words by the end of the month.