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VOTE FOR ME!!! Please?
In what? I hear you ask. Good question. I dare say that most people in the blogosphere aren’t familiar with the Sydney Writers’ Centre‘s competition to find the Best Australian Blogs of 2012. Well, the competition exists, and I entered it. If nothing else, I figured I could find some great blogs to follow from fellow entrants.
Anyway, there’s a People’s Choice Award as part of the comp, and that’s where you come in. You don’t need to be Australian to vote, so there’s nothing to stop you, right? All you do is click on the pretty badge below or in the sidebar, or, if the link doesn’t work for whatever reason, then you can just click here: VOTE HERE
You’ll have to scroll down to near the bottom of the page – just look for “Emily’s Tea Leaves” and tick the box.
While I have no way of knowing who has voted for me (if anyone, hahaha), if you do you can rest assured I will be forever grateful. And, if you have a blog and I don’t already follow you, leave me a link (in the comments section on this page) and I’ll head there pronto and hit “follow”. Promise!
And now, back to business. Today’s topic is unexpected subplots.
I was doing some writing yesterday – just sketching out a scene in my notebook, because it’s school holidays here at the moment and getting to my computer for any length of time is proving tricky – when it took an unexpected turn. Essentially it was a basic office/workplace scene, when my MC and another character started going off on their own tangent. This is a character for whom I have very little back story beyond a name and physical description, who was pretty much there to populate the scene and not do much else. However, contrary to all my expectations, halfway through the scene in question I noticed that what was was initially a minor disagreement had turned into outright hostility. There is history between these characters, and there is definitely a significant conflict. The question now is, what do I do with this?
Don’t get me wrong, the new tension is great. It’s something that I can really get my teeth into, and it adds a delightful aspect to the story that wasn’t previously there. (By delightful, I mean for me as an author, not for my MC.) Sure, I need to work out what this conflict is all about, but I can do that. Office rivalries are nothing new, but they can make the mundane of the workplace much more interesting to both read and write about, so the scenes that by necessity had to take place in that environment are now just that little bit spicier.
On the downside, it means that there’s a lot more writing to do in this story than I had originally thought. I think it will be the better for it, but my fingers are not thanking me. My imagination, on the other hand … who doesn’t love a nemesis? Even when it’s an unintended one. :) My mind is going at a million miles an hour, and by the time this posts I could well have this character’s back story and her beef with my MC all worked out. Integrating it into the narrative is just another challenge.
Who else has had their story take unexpected turns when new and surprising subplots have arisen during the writing process? How did you deal with it – embrace it and follow it through, or try to quash it? And how did it turn out? I’d love to know. 
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