What should you do when your characters stray from the outline? Utsudo believes that within the framework of your outline, you should respect your characters’ will, because when characters act on their own, they often produce better plot turns than the author expected. The author’s job is to keep watch: use the outline to quickly check the story hasn’t gone off the rails—so a romance doesn’t end up pairing the wrong couple, or a mystery doesn’t suddenly become an alien invasion. Characters stealing the show usually pushes the word count past plan and may require rewriting earlier chapters, but it means they’ve come alive, and the effort is worth it.

Translated from Utsudo’s original Chinese column.

Characters who want to act their own way

Someone once asked me, “My outline says this, but my characters want to do that. Should I let them keep going, or hold them down and force them to follow the outline?”

Outlines matter, of course, but I think bringing characters to life matters too.

When your characters start acting on their own, you as the writer have it easy, because you just have to be an observer and record everything—provided they don’t suddenly swerve from the genre you meant to write into something else, or fly off and never come back.

For example, say you meant to write an ordinary romance, but as you go, the two male side characters suddenly fall for each other. Not only is the heroine left out in the cold, they flirt right in front of her—that’s no good.

Or say you’re writing a suspense horror story, and suddenly the protagonist loudly announces he’s actually an alien from Planet K, here to conquer Earth and make all humans survive by chewing on curtains. He tosses the locked-room murder case aside and launches into a fantasy adventure—that obviously won’t do either.

Respect your characters’ will within the outline’s framework

I believe that within the framework of your outline, you should let characters develop according to their own will, because that may produce better plot turns than you expected. I think the chances of that are high: your characters have taken on a life of their own, so they naturally act out the story that best fits who they are. That’s a wonderful thing.

As the author, you’re responsible for keeping watch. While your characters are being themselves, check whether the current development fits your original skeleton (the outline). You can adjust the outline slightly so your characters don’t fly off completely, but it still has to fit the framework.

The outline is a tool for spotting drift

When characters fly off, the outline becomes important, because it lets you quickly review whether your work has “come apart.” If you don’t want major revisions later, it’s best to write an outline to check against, or review your existing outline to see if anything needs changing.

When characters steal the show, word counts balloon

That said, when characters start acting on their own, it usually means one thing: you’ll write more than you planned. For example, a story planned at 70,000 characters may expand to around 100,000 before you can reasonably bring the characters back to the original plot.

Writing more than you intended may be a bit tough, and sometimes you’ll even need to rewrite earlier parts. But I believe the effort pays off. In my own experience, when characters start acting out the story on their own, there’s a high chance that work becomes one of my proudest.

So when your characters start acting on their own, be happy—they’ve come vividly alive under your pen. Accept this gift and write their story well!

FAQ

Further reading

• Previous: Hey! I Heard You’re a Writer on Ghost Island #232: Successful Creators Will Always Be Few
• Start from the beginning: Hey! I Heard You’re a Writer on Ghost Island #01: Utsudo’s Debut — A Road to the Dream Covered in Frost
• Utsudo’s books

About the author

Utsudo is a Taiwanese light novelist and novelist VTuber with more than ten years in the industry and 40 commercially published print books. Her novel 《遺失的情書》 received a 2022 Ministry of Culture youth creative award. The 《嘿！聽說妳在鬼島當作家》 series records her experiences as a novelist in Taiwan.