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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2511 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 24, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Those of you who dabble in writing fiction, how do you keep your characters from derailing your plot? Or is just the sign that the original plot sucked?

I've given up on planning my stories beyond the starting circumstances. My best ideas come to me while I'm in the midst of writing. Potentialities that I can spot, take notes on, sometimes even act on before they flutter away from my brain each night while I sleep. The key is to just dedicate unbroken blocks of time, I've found, and to think about projects frequently. As far as hardcoded outlines go, those have never worked for me. My mind goes blank when I try to enact them.

I usually figure out how the novel ends when I've written about 60% of it. If you wanted to write a particular plot, then you need to take pains from the outset to write the sort of characters that support it. Fiction is an art of fitting together details. That's all it is, when it comes down to it, details that create the texture of a world a reader can believe. You will never get everything to fit perfectly, but the best stories are those where the character tensions and plot holes are so subtle as to be unnoticeable. More actionably, you'd be surprised how easily you can move characters by leveraging random chance in a believable way. Need an idiot ball? He was drinking hard that night. Need to force aggression? Bad day, foul mood, poor choices. A war is fated to occur but both parties are reasonable? Add an unreasonable subordinate.

Sometimes it's worth following where the characters go. That's easiest when it's a detour - often a big scene just needs a different setup, or to happen in a different order, or have just one character out of the room - but sometimes it means changing the crux of the story. It doesn't always make it better, and I have seen it make the work much less coherent, but it's worth at least considering.

That said, if this is for the one-handed novelette or some major climactic scene, though, that may not be what you're looking for. You don't want to switch out a big action, drama, or sex scene just because your characters are getting cold feet or wouldn't be that adventurous.

... but I'd point out that very few people are perfectly attached to their principles and character. Throw temptation: would they do it for money, or pussy (or dick), or status? Throw time pressure: would they do it because someone threw a grenade into the room and they reacted instinctively, or because they only had a half-second to say no? Throw their judgement into question: would they do it if drunk as a skunk, or enraged to the breaking point, or half-asleep, or bleeding? Throw their certainty in question: have their peers judge them for their principles, or the villain tell them persuasively why their principles don't work, or have a valued ally suffer from their unflinching behavior earlier.

Alternatively, it can be a good reason to explore why this one out-of-character moment exists. Why is your brave warrior is fleeing like a coward can make a whole movie. That's one of the more dangerous ones, because it can take over or change the themes of a work heavily if the reason is heavy, even if it has no impact on the plot, but it can be all the more valuable for it.

climactic scene

I see what you did there.

And thanks for the advice, I really appreciate it. It's a one-handed novella already, btw, sitting at 24411 words right now with at least eight more scenes left.

That's the secret.

You don't.

Seriously, some of the best moments when writing has occurred when some character promptly does something that makes perfect sense in-character, but utterly derails my plans.

Then again, I suppose if you're an actual professional, this might be more than a bit annoying. ... Conversely, I know of atleast one writer that wrote of his kitchy slop just to get it on paper and out of the way with no intent on publishing only to have his fans go 'I really want to see!' and turned it into a multi-novel series. So...

Writers are sometimes broken into two categories. Architects plan everything in advance, and then go fill in the outline. Brandon Sanderson is an architect. IIRC, his writing process is something like "set up the outline with all story beats, then a more detailed outline, then fill it in with descriptions, then produce a beta manuscript, then a real manuscript, then five editing passes".

The other category is Gardeners, who plant a seed and just see where the story takes them. GRRM is a gardener, and there are a thousand essays comparing him with Brando Sando on this regard.

For your case, it might not be that the plot "sucked", as that the characters weren't quite right for it. You probably have to alter one or the other to make it fit right. This is where the "kill your darlings" advice comes in. Sometimes hard choices have to be made, but you can always recycle anything you cut.

My characters derailed the plot.

I didn't have a plot to derail.

Mostly i wrote situations and starting settings and only had a vague sense of where things might go in a chapter or two. I would lean towards interesting stuff happening.

This was partly a result of my experience being a dungeon master. The people I played with would always derail whatever I had planned. So I learned to only prepare for the session I was hosting and no further.

I've tried to write out extended outlines and plans for stories. But I always got bored writing those stories, since I knew what was going to happen it stripped me of my main motivation to write more.

I was going to answer from my experience, writing homework essays in high school since I bullshat practically every one I ever wrote, and it was highly fictional.

How many people here actually write genuine fiction?

I think we've got at least 3 or 4.

I try.

I'm not a writer, but I imagine if that happens you either go back and rewrite the character to have a personality that makes the plot work, or you rewrite the plot to accommodate the personalities of the characters, right?

But sometimes I guess it might mean that the original plot was just irrational.

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