To what degree do we decide what's in our stories, and to what degree does it come unbidden?
I think there's a scale. Cyn, I know what side of the scale you fall on.
For me, it seems to go like this. An idea, or the gist of it, appears from somewhere. I play with it for awhile, thinking, making notes. I can choose what I'm going to do with it. At some point it gels, takes on a life of its own, and my choices are circumscribed.
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You know where I'm at. It's all just in there. At least the characters are. But sometimes I do get ideas of things they should do, places they should go or new and fascinating ways to commit crimes. I'm sure there is an idea intake and development process, I'm just not fully aware that it's going on sometimes.
Usually, the first half of my stories are decided, and the last half unplanned, although occasionally there's a vague notion of what's going to happen.
The book I wrote last, it took forever for the ending to come to me. Frustrating, because the denouement had to be *huge*.
The only one of my mysteries I've ever become totally stalled on was one where I decided ahead of time I wanted to set it at a doll show. I've started and restarted that book five times and I just can't get past the middle. And I need to get past the middle, because there are events that happen and characters introduced that come into play in books I have actually finished. But sometimes things just hit me totally unplanned and I'm startled by it. I can remember sitting in our minivan at a light at Broadway and South and it instantly occurring to me that what I thought was two stories was actually one and that I really needed to kill a character. Reading back over three years worth of material, it looks like I was planning to bump her off all along. But I sure wasn't aware of it.
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