Changing on the fly
I'm in what I hope is the downhill stretch of The Far West at last. I have finally gotten my characters out of town and moving, and yesterday I got to what was supposed to be a throwaway bit at their first stop, just a little bit of business to establish how their expedition operates before they get out into dangerous territory. Two paragraphs of summary, tops.
It came out six and a half pages long.
What I had initially thought was going to be a brief reminder of several bits of backstory with maybe a tiny bit of foreshadowing that could be useful in the future, all in tight summary form, became six pages of action and conversation involving nine named characters (old and new) and several unnamed spear-carriers. The dialog is, I hope, colored by the different attitudes the various characters have toward each other, the varying positions of authority they occupy, the differing sorts of magic they have, and a couple of things that are going on so far off stage that I'm not sure they'll even end up getting into the book.
I like the scene very much, but it's certainly not what I had planned when I sat down to write.
This is why I have to keep revising my plot outlines, even when I'm supposed to be three-quarters done with something. It's also why I can never use the sort of plot-planning worksheets and programs that seem to be beloved by so many, not even to work things out that are only a chapter away. Because I can't actually predict which of my events and plot-points are going to be scenes or chapters and which are going to end up being a two-paragraph summary.
This is also why I can't "write ahead," the way some writers do. There are some upcoming scenes that are going to be affected by the fallout from this particular incident, if only because several of the characters who had not previously encountered each other have now met and formed opinions of each other. A now worries that B is going to undercut his authority, while C was favorably impressed by B and D, and E is having to suppress his jealousy a lot earlier than I'd expected.
As far as plot goes, at least two future incidents that I'd been considering are no longer possible at all unless sabotage is involved…hmm…. (What? Oh, sorry, distracted for a minute there.) And I'm not going to need the scenes I'd planned for later that establish all the various things I talked about in the last paragraph, because now they've already been established in this scene. They'll need development, but that will happen differently from the way I'd planned, too, and therefore it will require different scenes. And so on.
If I'd gone ahead and written the scene at the river that's coming up about three weeks in my character's future (and that is supposed to go in the next chapter somewhere, though I'm beginning to doubt that I'll get there that fast), I'd have to, at best, tear it apart to make all the relationships and reactions consistent with what just happened. At worst, I'd have to bin the whole thing and start over. If I'd written the heart-to-heart talk between D and E, I'd have had to pitch the whole scene, period - after this, it's just not going to happen. And there are a couple of new possibilities for A and C and G that I hadn't even thought about until I got to the end of this scene and saw how they were interacting.
My backbrain is a lot smarter than I am. Sometimes, this is depressing to contemplate, but at least it does interesting things to my books.
