Chatty Characters

 As I attempt to navigate a novel with an introverted protagonist, I sometimes miss the days I described in this post from 2016, before Courting Peace was finished. And that novel I was revising? 

Still working on it. Sigh.

Sometimes, my characters won't keep quiet.

After I finished Chasing a Second Chance, I was determined to revise another novel. One with different characters. One that had been sitting patiently on my hard drive as I continued to wrestle with Marita, Angel, Charli and all their friends.

At first, I stuck to my guns, as my mother would say. I was making progress, too: tightening prose, clearing hurdles, bringing revised pages to my critique group....

Until the characters from Casting the First Stone/Chasing a Second Chance started chiming in.

They didn't want to be in the book I was working on (fortunately). Oh, no. They wanted one of their own.

Another one.

They actually started clamoring for more attention as I was finalizing the revisions on Chasing a Second Chance, giving me all sorts of ideas for what should happen next.

Next? They were supposed to be finished after Casting the First Stone.

But, I'm no fool. When the muse visits, you drop what you're doing and offer her a cup of tea. I jotted down all the ideas, even typed up a scene or two to humor them and organized everything by character so that when I finished my revisions, I could return to my notes and figure out what I (they) had been thinking.

Photo: langll via Pixabay

Were they satisfied? Of course not. Jealous of the new characters (perhaps), they continued to tempt me with story ideas. And, like the author who dreamed them up in the first place, they're no fools. They knew exactly how to do more than tempt me -- how to suck me in so that just keeping notes   (no matter how beautifully organized) and writing partial scenes wasn't enough.

I had to write.

So, here I am, writing the third book in a one book series, while simultaneously revising the novel I'm determined to breathe life into. Not surprisingly, I can be as stubborn as they are.

But when the characters visit, I drop what I'm doing and offer them a cup of tea.

I might even take them to Starbucks.