Would the guilty protagonist please raise their hand?

I am, more or less, a plotter. That is, someone who knows the plot before starting to write. Despite what that sounds like, I do not necessarily know the story. Oh, I can do the sticky notes and the spreadsheets or what have you, but suddenly there’s Tobias and his giant mechanical beastie when he had no business wrecking the opera house. I didn’t plan on it, but at the end of the day there were 3,000 words of unmitigated chaos.

Over the years, I’ve come to tolerate such literary joy rides. Characters have strong ideas about their destiny. They know where they want their adventure to go and, if I’m very nice, they sometimes send a memo so I can keep up. Where things get especially tricky is when these ulterior motives not only alter the plot but also the core of the story.

Explanatory sidebar:  A plot is literally what happens in a book. English instructors like to graph a lopsided parabola to illustrate mounting conflict and eventual resolution, and sometimes we pay for special writing software to do more or less the same thing.

Fancy plotters will point out that there are internal and external plots, and plots for each protagonist and the villain, and they all weave together in glorious literary macrame. Fancy plotters make for long books that kill spiders real good.

Short or long, plots can be plotted and more or less followed by hapless novelists without injury. The exception is caused by plot bunnies. These beasts lure the unwary with enticing irrelevancies, whereupon entire books and their writers may be lost, alas, down a black hole.

But I ramble. Back to the story, which is not the same thing as a plot. It’s more than theme or symbolism or the prize at the bottom of the box. A story is what the book is actually about, and may not be what the writer expects when they sat down to start drafting.

I was reminded of this again in my latest work in progress. Following an unauthorized (literally, the author had no idea this was coming) and rather foolish move, my protagonist’s agonized choice connected a dozen throw-away incidents and resolved the entirety of what came after. In other words, it made everything come together—not separate from the plot, not instead of the plot, but giving the events a texture and resonance I did not foresee.

What do I mean by this? Stories have a central idea, theme, philosophy, or direction. It doesn’t have to be too explicit (and probably shouldn’t be) but it shows up in how the characters and the story world function. The steam barons in the Baskerville Series exist to show the impact of capitalist cannibalism, but so do a lot of other elements that accumulate over the trilogy’s narrative. There’s not one flashing sign, but many bits and pieces that add up to a pervasive evil. The moment that pulled them all together for me is when I realized the significance of the automatons, which had rattled around for hundreds of pages. Then, all of a sudden, Lord Bancroft went off script. It was then I understood the intersection of magic and technology and grief and greed.

Strange as this may seem, every good story has a moment when one’s characters stop being puppets, take over the keyboard, and make meaning of the prose. This happens only after the book has been rambling on long enough to get to know the cast of characters on a gut level. Their psychology has deepened to embrace its own logic and, perhaps, agency. In short, they’ve developed the capacity to surprise their creator. Yes, this can be mightily inconvenient but also intensely revelatory.

The best move is to step back and let it happen. Perhaps it is a function of the author’s subconscious. After all, there are usually bits in place like train tracks with destination TBA. I’m always adding in throwaway details I think will end up on the cutting room floor, but they almost always get used during the protagonist’s unplanned tour de force. Suddenly these tidbits make sense, like foreshadowing we didn’t know we were creating. They end up part of the essential structure.

I don’t understand the phenomenon in any real sense. All I know is that the cast goes rogue and when I recover steering, the elements of story have lined up better than before.