Why Won't Characters Do As They're Told?

Wikimedia Commons, The Bible and Its Story, Charles F. Horne and Julius August Brewer

According to his creator Robert E. Howard, Conan the barbarian – that primordial figment of masculine imagination – entered our world like he’d been real all along. In a letter to fellow pulp author Clark Ashton Smith in 1935, Howard wrote, “I did not create [Conan] by any conscious process. He simply stalked full grown out of oblivion and set me to work recording the saga of his adventures.”

In truth, the charac...