Ghosts of Plots Past

This past week I recveived a writing prompt in my inbox from Figment (a great writing website and resource for youth and young adults...or well anyone actually). The prompt was to write a story about your characters when they find out you've abandoned their story. The thing is...I've abandoned a lot of characters. Sometimes that makes me shrug my shoulders. Sometimes that makes me feel like a failure. Instead I tried to look at it as one of those funny things that happens to writers and their characters.

So I sat down and hastily typed out 1,300 words about my three most recent characters. All three are women I abandoned midway through their stories. It's worth noting that all three of them are characters from my most recent NaNoWriMo stories. Two of these three stories were part of "winning years." You can read more about NaNo and my "wins" over here.

I wrote about Leonora being trapped innside Jane Eyre. And trapped inside my story about her being trapped inside Jane Eyre. I wrote about Arianna finding her village street abandoned and her husband's sudden unwavering silence. I wrote about Marigold's confusion when Mitchell suddenly stopped kissing her. Poor girl. He just sat there staring blankly despite her best efforts.

And I wrote about how each of these three young women walked and walked and walked until the settings around them disappeared. They found trees and grass and fields of wild flowers. Then the trees and flowers disappeared. Then the grass. The ground became barren. The sky's color desaturated. They were still...someplace. They each found the edge of their stories. The edge of my plots. They found the points beyond my plans for them. They also found each other.

Leonora figured it out first. She is, of course, well-versed in finding herself within a story. When she and her love interest fell into the pages of a book, she figured it out quickly. So when she noticed the story had stopped progressing, she walked until she found the edge of her own story.

I'm not sure what this discovery means for my three heroines. All three of the plots were interesting and challenging in their own ways. All three of these women are fully developed characters in my mind. I know why they do the things that they do. Even when they do things I don't orignally intend. Maybe in this little meta-story where my characters are self-aware they'll be able to convince me to finish their stories and give them places to make out with potential boyfriends, husbands and love interests in peace.