The characters change the story!

Sometimes my characters are really difficult to work with. They develop their own minds and do things that I do not expect.

Now I know this sounds crazy, since I'm writing the book, but it's exactly what happens and can really make me crazy.

In The Watcher's Keep, one of the characters died at a point in the book where he was still to play a key role going forward. His death was inevitable as it turned out, but I had already written him into the final scene in the book!

I needed to do some rewriting and ended up much happier with the story that resulted, but at the time I really thought that this character's death was something I could not deal with.

This is just one example of things that happen in the writing process that I feel I have no control over. I've always said that I "Go visit the Aren and come back and write about it," and I seem to be doing that more and more as time goes by.