In my younger days, at the age of ten, I discovered poetry. I still have my very first poem. And I distinctly remember sitting at our dining room table in Summerville, Georgia, typing this on an old blue Royal typewriter. In my teens, as I became the typical hormonal drama queen, my writings intensified. I also began to collect sayings, quotes and other people's poetry. I kept them in three-ring notebooks in the bottom drawer of my cedar dresser, and they were as precious to me as gold. Whenever I felt blue or misunderstood, which for a teenager is a daily occurrence, I’d leaf through the pages until I felt renewed. One such gem pops into my head even to this day: “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was.” 

When it popped into my head this morning, it occurred to me this philosophy could be applied to storytellers. 

Out from the corridors of our creative mind, comes an idea. It's a scene or a conversation that is absolutely brilliant. We dive into the writing, that scene or that line hovering, and we write like mad to get to it. But halfway there, the characters seem to lose interest. They take off on their own. We’re horrified. Where do you think you’re going? we ask. They come back with something sassy, We don’t want to do that anymore. We’re going over here to do this. And we say, Is that so? And we cluck like a mother hen and gather them back to our bosom and tell them to hush and to mind and to get their rebellious behinds back to the spot we placed them. Eventually they comply, albeit kicking and screaming, and generally behave the way we've sketched out. But as we reach that scene or line we've been waiting for, we realize the actual idea isn't half as good as the imagined one. In fact, it feels downright… wrong. 

There’s a simple reason for this. It’s contrived.

Now if we look up that word in the dictionary, we first find it is a verb that means “to plan with ingenuity, devise, invent.” Sounds almost noble, doesn't it? But if we mosey on down the page a bit, we find it is also an adjective that means “forced, artificial, strained.” Hmm. That doesn't sound noble at all. Could this adjective be what editors are referring to when they jot it in the margins?

Indubitably. 

Contrived stories consist of unbelievable coincidences (the widower’s date looks, sounds and even shares the same birthday as his dead wife), illogical paths (a police officer fights incredible odds to get through the Academy and then opens a restaurant), Divine Intervention (a virgin surrounded by street thugs is saved by the hand of God) or anything else that doesn’t seem remotely feasible within the confines of the story. It’s bad plotting run amok. 

And we all know what sort of response bad-plotting-run-amok elicits from readers: Oh, come on. Or Give me a break. Or … Flutter, flutter, bam! (That’s the sound of the manuscript flying across the room.)

Suspension of disbelief is lost. Trust is out the window. Our well-constructed story crumbles like a burnt cracker. And to what do we owe this dismal failure? Our inability to let go.

Yes, a storyteller must know at all times where the story is going, but not necessarily how it gets there. Maybe a 37-car pileup redirects us off the beaten path. Maybe a dam breaks, closing a bridge. Maybe a tractor explodes. Heck, maybe a roadside attraction or a cozy restaurant calls out to us as we pass. When we take a trip, we don’t know what we're going to encounter or what we might want to explore down the road. All we can do is be prepared to change our initial plans if the circumstances demand it.

Likewise, when we come up on a bump in a scene, the worst thing we can do is try to drive around it or plow through it like a bulldozer. Stop and look at it. Forget about how this dilemma throws a gigantic cog in the well-planned wheel you’ve designed farther down the line. Matter of fact, forget about your plans for a moment. 

Instead, ask your main character, All right, Mr. Main Character, how are you going to get out of this? And then listen to what he says. By remaining in his perspective, you take on his values, his strengths, his fears, and his level of expertise. That’s all you need. What then unfolds is natural for him, not for you. 

It makes sense. It feels right. It instills awe in your readers. Of course! they’ll cry. How did I not see that coming?

IN A NUTSHELL
Go with the flow.