Authors, do you follow your Muse?

Find me on Facebook and visit my website, http://www.bfoswaldauthor.com. Thank you.

During my twenty-five years as a professor, I authored two textbooks, numerous lectures and volumes of student syllabi and study guides. From time to time I would also write a short story for the college literary magazine. I discovered that I enjoyed writing short fiction and that it also provided a break from the sometimes-tedious work of producing academic stuff. Judging from the feedback I received from my readers, I was rather good at it. (Many of these stories were incorporated into my first published novel, Echoes of Ellen, and reprised in my book, Short Stories by a Short Author.)

I discovered early on that soon after I had created my characters and begun their story, they seemed to take over the scenarios in which they took part, at times varying the story moderately by directing changes in action or behavior, sometimes changing the story completely. If I tried to override this input, I would develop writer’s block. I am a stubborn person so it took me a while to accept this (weird?) direction. It troubled me that I couldn’t explain these ‘voices’ in my head. They were not clear as if hearing another person in the room dictating plot and action; they were subtler, like a sudden insight surprising in that it was so different from what I had originally conceived such as a piece of dialog or sequence of action or, in the extreme, even the plot; (Were the 'voices' those of my Muse?) Five Women in Black ends the way Rea Parker, my protagonist, wanted it to, not the way I intended, even though her ending was frequently found unsatisfying to many of my readers.

Along with my academic work, I had a private practice as a therapist and obedient to the state laws that govern that profession, I had a supervisor, a therapist’s therapist, in fact a number of them over the years that I had to see twice yearly. None pronounced me psychotic when I tried to explain my experience as a writer, but only one seemed to understand the phenomenon I described. When I brought my ‘voices’ to his attention, he smiled and said he knew exactly what I was experiencing because he also wrote fiction as an avocation and let his characters guide him. His advice: go to writer’s workshops and talk to other authors; I would probably meet more than one whose characters directed their stories. And he was right.

So fellow scribblers, do you find that your characters direct the role they play in your stories? Do you follow their lead? I'd appreciate your letting me know. And if you have a way of explaining this phenomenon more clearly than I did, please share that with me also. Thank you.