Stubborn Stories

And by stubborn I don't mean bad, or even necessarily ones that get stuck in the middle. I just mean...ones that have a mind of their own.

Writers sometimes talk about characters that have a mind of their own. This can be great fun, as when, for example, one of my characters put her foot down about the fiery climactic ending of her story and insisted on a quiet, clever ending of perfect poetic justice instead. And I'm serious, that ending wasn't even on my radar. I wanted fire! Death! Blood! But none of that would have been as good as what happened just by following the character's path. And I'm intensely proud of that ending now.

Sometimes characters having a life of their own can be bad: witness one particular story which is not and might never be finished because one of the lead characters just didn't seem right no matter what I did. She was fighting me, but not in the good way. I went back and rewrote her a million times, determined to make her what I needed her to be, but no matter how I changed her entrance or her origin story, she always ended up being a stubborn, pain in the butt b*tch. She made it so hard to write that my frustration with her drew in the other characters and the plot, and ended in a giant tangle which I still haven't figured out how to fix.

But what I'm really talking about here is stories that have their own lives. The story I'm working on now was supposed to be about ghosts. And possibly fate. And then suddenly it wasn't. Suddenly it was about modern day witchcraft, lovers that are something more than human, and following dreams. Where did it come from? I had characters and events planned, which are still more or less unchanged, but the crux, the spirit, the feeling of the story just grew up around those on its own, completely unexpectedly.

And it's not just the themes of the story that have switched around on me. I can feel this one growing too. Imagine having hold of a small, thin little grass snake that's coiled calmly around your hand. Then suddenly it starts to struggle and whip around fiercely while simultaneously growing to the size of a boa constrictor. That's how hanging onto this story feels. It doesn't want to be a short story. It wants to be a novel.

The problem is: is can't be. I'm writing m/m fiction in the little gap before I really, really need to get to work on my next novel (which I'm writing under my other name, and no, still not telling). I intend to carry on writing m/m stories, and I might even try for a novel at some point, but I'm going to need to concentrate on the new novel exclusively for a little while when I start, and that means I need to get this m/m story finished. And preferably in another week or two. I don't have time to write an m/m novel now. I don't even want to - part of the joy of m/m fiction and publishing online is that you can feel free to write stories that are short and perfect and polished. For me, writing short stories is like writing almost for pure fun. It takes away 90% of my stress and angst to know that I won't still be labouring away on the same story in a year's time (and it does normally take between a year and eighteen months for me to finish a novel).

So I need to be really strict, put my foot down, and stay to this stubborn story, Hey, it's great to meet you, and I love what you did with the selkie thing there, but no, you don't get to be a novel length story. You have to be around 20,000 words long. Maybe 25,000. That's it. Sorry. No more. Look, stop crying now, it's embarrassing. Eat a cookie. There, there.

And then I have to hope that the story will work with me, and not end up in a Gordian Knot, because, really, deep inside, the stubborn ones are the ones I'm the fondest of, and I'd hate not to get to finish this.