When Characters Speak Up

What happens when a character, who, when you originally wrote her, was one of the more elusive of the set, suddenly decides to speak up and demand her own story?  You try to tell her to stop, but end up giving in and allowed her to take over her own novella.  At least, this is how this reasoning goes when a little story-bug gets into your brain and won’t let go.

Not that I’m complaining.  Story-bugs are the best.  Really.  There’s passion, and imagination, and fire there.  It means that a character has a voice that demands to be heard, and usually, if you let yourself follow the story-bug, something interesting comes out of it.

Now, I’ll admit, it isn’t always a full-blown story.  I’ve had story-bugs think they are full novels but end up realizing they are just fabulous sub-plots to another tale.  They end up being important points in the over-all reach of the story in ways I didn’t expect.

Then you have story-bugs that started out only as a sub-plot idea that somehow blooms into a bigger one.  That’s where I am currently.  Solene White, a character in my novel Turned/Red I wrote about earlier (here) was only ever supposed to be a sub-plot.  Having based her off of Snow White and a few well-talked about monarchs in history, I didn’t feel like I wanted to re-hash an over-told tale.  I was wrong.  Apparently.

In the original plotting of the story-arcs, she never received her own.  The “Cinderella” character would get one, the “Sleeping Beauty” character would get one, down the line even a “Dorothy” and “Tinkerbell” character would get one… but not “Snow White.”  That, however, was back when I was taking the story in a very fairy-tale re-telling route, before it turned on its head, pulled from the War of the Roses and my dystopian love and jumped the curve.  Happily.

But now Solene isn’t content to be in Red’s story.  She wants her own.  So does Mal.  So does Red’s mother.  These women have stories they want to tell.  Novellas.  Not fully grown tales, but mini-ones.  And while I spent this week trying, and failing, to focus efforts purely on my paranormal fantasy project, they were begging me to give.

So I did.  Novellas for everyone it seems.