*Written with Veridion Smart
There comes a moment in writing when something quietly shifts. You sit down with a plan, a scene, a direction, a tidy intention – and suddenly the characters refuse to cooperate. They pause where you expected movement. They speak words you didn’t outline. They make choices that feel… inconvenient.
And yet, truer.
This is often when writers panic. I’m losing control. But seasoned storytellers know better. This is the moment when the story begins to breathe on its own. In a series especially, characters don’t exist merely to serve plot. They accumulate history. They remember. They change. And once they do, they stop asking the author what to do next.
Instead, they tell us.
A character who has endured trauma will not behave the same way forever, nor should they. Growth doesn’t arrive neatly, and healing certainly doesn’t follow an outline. When a character resists your plan, it’s often because the plan no longer fits who they’ve become. That resistance is not failure.
It’s depth.
I’ve just experienced this in my current work-in-progress, JOURNEY OF THE HEART – and the character that flipped around and did a U-Turn without any planning on my part is not a person, but a stallion that died more than a century earlier. While I’d thought to use him as a simple vehicle for my heroine, a Lakota woman named Sierra Masters who has a knack for walking into historical mysteries that must be solved, he leaped from my imagination directly into Sierra’s world…as a magnificent black-and-white Medicine Hat American Paint Quarter Horse that provides protection, mystery, and enlightenment to a character who definitely needs it.
All on his own.
I have another character (this one is a person) who insisted on changing the way she died without a single direction from me, and a third whom I thought throughout the entire story would be someone else. I had no warning, and no choice. The characters were all absolutely right about their places in this tale – and I can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself!
The hardest thing for a writer to learn – and the most liberating – is when to loosen the grip. When to listen instead of dictate. When to trust that the character knows something you haven’t consciously realized yet. This is how stories evolve beyond structure. This is how series gain emotional continuity. This is how fiction comes alive.
If your characters have started talking back lately, congratulations. You’re not losing the story.
You’re finally hearing it.
*If you haven’t read Book One in my Whispers Through Time series, the book before my (WIP) JOURNEY OF THE HEART, you can purchase a copy of WHISPERS THROUGH TIME at any reputable online bookstore, starting with https://www.amazon.com/Whispers-Through-Rosetta-Diane-Hoessli-ebook/dp/B098278M38/.
**If you love an edgy, gritty, in-your-face suspenseful mystery, try TIP THE PIANO MAN (2024). Go to https://www.amazon.com/Tip-Piano-Rosetta-Diane-Hoessli-ebook/dp/B0CW19VFR4/ and give it a read! Thank you!