The story’s coming together, you know who’s the hero and who’s the baddie. You’ve got all the ancillary characters, the locations, you’re sure of the theme. You’re ready to get down to the scene by scene and then suddenly from nowhere this character appears. You’re not quite sure how they’ve got there but suddenly they’re in the scene and they’re part of the story and if you tried to take them out, you’d find yourself with a hole in the plot. Your uninvited guest has made themselves at home.
This kind of development happens more to me in prose than it does in scripts and it may well be that prose at the early draft stage is more relaxed and open to experimentation.. Also it could be novels allow the reader to handle more characters than drama – there’s time for the reader to wander down meandering roads. The novel is not the tightly constructed screen play, where, if you follow the Hollywood model, you’ll know exactly where you are and if you’re not, what you need to do to get there. Films need a story as tightly nailed down as a short, short story. There’s no room f.or uninvited characters.
Yet just because you didn’t know they were coming, until you opened the door on a scene and there they were, doesn’t mean that your uninvited characters are going to change the story you want to tell. You could suddenly find that your story expands or gains depth through the new character providing a storyline that has resonance for the hero.
In the children’s novel I’m working on at the moment, I was writing a scene where a lieutenant has to report to the arch villain, Jeremiah, who’s evil and cruel. Writing’s all about show not tell as we’re continually told, so to leave the reader in no doubt as to Jeremiah’s despicable nature, I wrote a scene where he’s interrogating a poor snivelling wretch. Even poor snivelling wretches if you give them dialogue have to have names but beware, as soon as you give them one, they’ll come alive and start offering you insights into how they could add a bit of variety and humour and even allow your main characters to show who they really are. Still you should think carefully before you christen them; will Snivelling Wretch No. 1 become a monster and try to take over the show.
So Edwards, as he is now, is part of The Curse of Millie Hapless. He hasn’t taken over the show, just fitted in nicely. Millie is a 12 year old girl who accidentally travels back in time and discovers that her ancestor, a famous lady smuggler and spy has been wrongly accused of betraying England, a slur that has echoed through the centuries and impacted on the modern day Hapless family. Millie naturally sets about overturning this injustice. It was only when I wrote Edwards into that interrogation scene that I saw how he could add to the twists and turns of the plot and even help to save Millie’s great, great, great, great grandmother, Lucy from the gallows.
I’m not saying that all uninvited guests shouldn’t be shown the door but just occasionally it’s worth offering the odd one some hospitality for they could repay you handsomely.
Writing is rewriting 