In any work that is truly creative, I believe,
the writer cannot be omniscient in advance about
the effects that he proposes to produce. The suspense of a novel
is not only in the reader, but in the novelist,
who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.
Mary McCarthy
Do you agree with this? Does this mean that she doesn’t believe that plotting the storyline of a piece of fiction is creative? Do you plot your fiction?
I don’t necessarily agree (and I’m not sure what she believed beyond what is written in this quote). Often when I post these quotes, I almost want to do several at once to show how writers have quite different opinions on the same subject. (And I hope that when I post them, several writers may chime in to agree or disagree with them.)
As for me personally, I always know how my novels will end. I usually don’t know how they’ll get there. If I start with a detailed plot, I find that as I write, I invaribly stray (sometimes far) from it. Most often I find that secondary characters do things I hadn’t planned and those things affect my narrator/protagonist and therefore my plot. So I try not to begin with too detailed an outline but instead with a thorough understanding of my protagonist.
I have talked to writers who’ve gotten very frustrated when their stories take turns they didn’t expect, or they have characters suddenly pop up out of nowhere. I say go with it and see what happens.
As an example from my own work, in THREE FORTUNES, Jess didn’t exist when we planned the novel. Many of the things I thought Shanon would offer Phillip (our protagonist) were provided by Jess, who became a significant person in his life. This wasn’t the result of the novel’s being a collaboration. Once she appeared, Jess simply took over more of both Tim’s and my writing. Rather than resisting her, we went with it. Come to find out, there was a good reason Jess showed up.
This is a great quote.
You might think you know where you’re going, but it doesn’t
always work out that way. If the characters really come
alive they begin to rebel and do things THEIR way. And
I find that they are almost always right.
That’s hot.