Goodreads asked David Flin:

What’s the best thing about being a writer?

David Flin When the characters suddenly take on a life of their own, and I no longer need to think how they will react in the situation, because they just respond without an apparent intervention from me. That's when I know that the character has become 3-dimensional.

Once that has happened, they respond better to the plot, and quite often, the plot itself becomes more interesting to me. They find hidden elements within it, and the writing process becomes more of a voyage of discovery for me as author. It can be frustrating when I've a plot line worked out, and I get to the lead-in to it, and realise that the character would do something completely different, and I need to reconsider the whole thing. The really annoying part is when the reworked plot that they've set-up usually works a lot better than my original plan.

I guess this is partly through years of experience of telling bed-time stories, where the answer to: "Daddy, is Pwff y Ddraig Hud going to appear?" is "Funny you should mention that ..."

Put good characters into an interesting situation, and the plot generally - I find - writes itself. And the satisfying part is when the character suddenly clicks, and they become real.

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