Writing Fantasy is the perfect pastime for us control freaks. We get to play god in our own universe. We control every aspect of the environment. Fauna. Flora. Physics. Magic. Everything. We control every single character. Their abilities, their behavior, their thoughts, their emotions. We also control the beings (human or otherwise) they come in touch with, and we determine the story events. We put our characters through hell (or not), we hurt them, we redeem them, we send them their soulmate – or their worst nightmare.
We can even write our own worst enemies into our stories and ridicule them, humiliate them, even kill them off with glee and gouts of blood, and if we’re not too obvious about it, we won’t even end up in court.
What could be more fun?
Of course there are the instances when our characters suddenly don’t want to go where we are determined to put them. Sometimes they develop a life and a personality of their own, and no amount of wrestling will get them back to where we thought they should be.
What’s a control freak to do? Me, I go with the flow. Since I don’t write to an outline anyway and don’t bother with character sheets, anything my characters throw at me is just there for the taking.
Sometimes these swamp bubbles take me in new and unanticipated directions. Sometimes they neatly solve a problem I’ve been struggling with. Other times they bring new, vexing problems to solve. Sometimes they lead me on a merry chase into the big nowhere, but sometimes they reveal things about the story, the characters, or even myself, that force me to go deeper, to confront uncomfortable emotions and break old thought patterns.
The greatest joys in writing – not to mention in life – often come when we open ourselves up to serendipity. When we give up preconceived notions. When we abandon control and let the magic happen.