Characters in Control

Most writers will have experienced the phenomenon of a character developing a mind of his or her own and taking their story in an unexpected direction.

I've been experiencing a fairly extreme case of this over the past few weeks.

Before you read any further, I should point out that, although the story I'm working on is as yet untitled and isn't anywhere near finished, there could be potential spoilers in the following account. When you've read it, you might want to find a friendly vampire to wipe your memory before this story gets published anywhere. Though given how long it's taking me to get the first one published, and the fact there are several others further up the pipeline than this one, you have plenty of time and you may well have forgotten all of this by then, anyway - but you have been warned.

I wanted, for this particular story, a "kiss and tell" article about one of the main characters to illustrate a) that he was a bit of a playboy and b) that another character, who was reading the article, was a tiny bit obsessed with him. I needed a title for this and the name of the supermodel who had written it.

It was one of those occasions when a name popped into my head, rather than my having to go through a mental list of all my friends and family for a name I haven't used yet, peruse my bookshelves for a likely name among the authors or activate a name generating app. In hindsight, it seemed this time that the character was out there in the creative ether somewhere already and wanted to introduce herself. Her name, she told me, was Puffball McKenzie. Yes, I know it sounds like a daft name, the sort celebrities saddle their kids with, but since she lives in a parallel dimension, odd names are fine (Although there are other characters in the same story with perfectly ordinary names that could easily belong to some bloke you meet down the pub).

I had what I needed for the scene I was writing. That was to be the extent of Puffball McKenzie's part in this story.

Then Puffball unexpectedly shows up when the aforementioned playboy character is on a date with another woman, and almost causes a scene - except her latest squeeze ushers her out of the restaurant before things get ugly.

I'd decided that I wasn't going to include an account of Puffball's encounter with the playboy character. I already had some romantic scenes involving characters whose relationships had a chance of going somewhere, and I reckoned that was enough.

Puffball didn't agree. She started telling me about it. To her credit, she didn't dwell on the most intimate parts of the evening, but she wanted me to know how they met and what happened immediately afterwards. She was also showing me what she looked like; a very clear image which inspired me to pick up a pen and draw her, even though she was still, at this point, a very minor character.

Then, as her account of that evening unfolded, she gave me some insights into her character. She showed me the inside of her apartment, where absolutely everything is either white or made from clear glass. All her clothes are white. The one splash of colour in her apartment is the green stems of some white roses she has in a clear glass vase on a clear glass coffee table. She gets more and more interesting.

As she tells me what happens in the morning, when she wakes up and finds him gone, it is as if she wants to correct the misconceptions people might have of her. Rather than being a cold, calculating character selling her story for money, she is disappointed, angry and feeling rejected. She writes the article in the heat of the moment, because she wants to hit back at this man in the only way she can think of that could possibly hurt him. She doesn't think through what the consequences might be for herself, and by the time she does, it's already gone viral.

That, I decided, is all we need to see of Puffball. We need to get on with the main focus of the story which involves a nuclear explosion that opens up a wormhole between Puffball's dimension and ours, and what happens to the characters who get sucked through it. Puffball isn't one of them; here is where we leave her behind.

Until I started writing about what would happen if those characters found a way back home; a way to produce a more stable wormhole so they can move freely between the two worlds.

Puffball wanted in on that.

I don't know if it was my growing sympathy for her, or part of the story she was telling me, that had me have her find love with someone totally unexpected, but that is what happens. That is also how she gets invited along to the big homecoming bash of the characters who've been missing for a couple of years. There is a closure with her and the playboy character, who is one of the people returning. All's well that ends well. Or is it?

Puffball seems not to be finished with me yet. She wants to go through the wormhole. As I write the conversations between the returners and their old friends, it is Puffball who asks if it's possible to visit Earth. She is told no, because passage through the wormhole had unexpected and random effects on people (some of them got super-powers) and so it is only really safe for people who've made the trip before.

I know exactly what Puffball is saying to me now. "Get me through the wormhole. I don't care how you do it. I want a super-power. I'm willing to take the risk."

I was thinking the story was nearly over, but it looks as if Puffball is going to go through, and of course a bunch of people are going to have to go through and rescue her, which is likely to result in at least one more person getting a super-power. Strangely enough, that person would be exactly the one Puffball would want to grant a super-power to, given the choice.

This is how Puffball went from being just a name on an article to being a major character and a super-heroine to boot! 

What was I saying about her not being calculating?