Writing Monsters

To write is to feel like a god. But sometimes even gods don’t get things right.

Tell me, what do you call that weird feeling you get when you’ve written something that runs completely out of your control – “Frankenstein’s Monster Syndrome?” Now tell me why that monster’s still chasing me years after leaping from my first Kindle novel.

I only realized the beast was loose when a reader asked me why my first two-fisted, globe-trotting thriller – Woman on Fire – has a female protagonist when I am, well, not female. (As Joe E. Brown said in the last scene of Some Like It Hot, “Nobody’s perfect!”) My novel started out with a male lead character and I still can’t figure how the heroine crept into the story and booted him out.

Yes, yes, I’ve tried to piece together the evidence from early drafts – not easy to do when dealing with speedy electrons – and I think this is how it happened:

I’m not the sort who can write a book in his/her head or even scribble a few plot notes, then key it into a neat manuscript and zip it off to fame and fortune. Because that’s telling the story. Once I’ve told the story to myself that way, it’s dead to me and I just can’t write it down. What I do instead is stumble across a good idea, a handful of outrageous characters and a rough direction for the story and just start hammering keys excited to see how it all turns out.

That didn’t quite happen with Woman on Fire. I had this fellow in my head – a wretched fellow lost in life, desperate to change everything, no idea how to do it. Suddenly, fortune followed by disaster! How does he handle all that? What changes does it make in him? Can he survive?

Hot with curiosity, I popped open my trusty clunky desktop PC and began keying the opening paragraph. But he wasn’t there in the first sentence. Or the second or third. She was there, this very strange woman. Staring at me out of the computer screen daring me to carry on the story without her. She took over the novel, lock, stock and down to the last exclamation mark, and believe me by then I was making a lot of exclamations.

Where she came from and how she did all that, I don’t know. And it worries me. Because I have to wonder, Will she come back and what story will she take over next?

I have no defenses against her because I don’t write stories, I listen to them and they are first of all for me. I write novels that I cannot find to read on a library shelf or a bookstore or even Amazon. The stories I like best are those of ordinary people who find themelves doing unexpectedly extraordinary things. People who, when their backs are against the wall, decide to be heroes, if for just this one moment.

In Woman on Fire, Kathryn Teal starts the story living the life of a coward but she ends a hero. I think she proves Buster Keaton wrong – every now and then some man or woman really does achieve a kind of perfection.

This post in a somewhat different form was part of an Indie Author Blog Tour hosted by Meghan Ciana Doidge’s MadebyMeghan blogsite at http://wp.me/pP9tA-aK.