Writers always seem to be so surprised when their current story project takes on a life of its own, changing from the vision of what they had originally intended into something completely different. I’m honestly not sure exactly _why_ writers are so surprised – this happens to me all the time. Maybe the difference is that I usually start out my stories with only a vague notion of what they’re going to be about, a fuzzy image and a couple of lines of dialogue that serve as the referential for everything else. Naturally, stories begun on so few scraps inevitably take on a life of their own, dumping me – and my readers – out in completely unexpected places. The writers who seem to be the most surprised, I’ve noticed, are the ones who lay out careful outlines from start to finish, only to find that the final product deviated around the second bullet point and took off into parts unknown (and unexpected).

Yet, you would think that after this happens a few times and hearing all the time how it happens to other writers that they would come to expect it. Wouldn’t you?

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