It’s time for the next installment of “Tales From a Roving Mind”. This week it’s all about expectations. Or to be more blunt, what you expect to write and what you end up with instead.




I expected, planned honestly, to write a Young Adult Fantasy novella. I wanted to write a few of them, with the goal being to string them together into one full length Novel. That didn’t happen. I couldn’t get into the swing of things. And like most of my writing projects it tethered off to nothing. I continued to work on the world and the characters but I wasn’t doing any actual, productive writing.

Then, on a whim, I revisited an old story. One I started writing 14 years ago. At the time I was a few months removed from a suicide attempt, my second of two, and while I was doing much better I was still in a dark place. I had just gotten out of the hospital, having spent two weeks in a Psychiatric ward, and was in the perfect place (emotionally) to write a dark Noir style detective story.  I title that story “Smoke”.

I only wrote about 10 pages of that before I moved on to, ironically enough, a fantasy story. Both of those are lost now, thanks to a dead hard drive.

I never tried to rewrite that fantasy story, but I have revisited Smoke on a couple of occasions. To very little success. Until now. For some reason I’m on a roll. I’ve written every day for the past three weeks, at least a thousand words a day. That’s crazy for me. So far I have 36 pages.

There is just one problem.

I mentioned ‘expectations’ earlier. I thought ‘Smoke’ would be a dark Noir style look into the life of an ‘on the edge’ PI. Instead, I’m getting something a lot different. The story I’m writing is much lighter. There’s a comedic undertone. It still has it’s dark moments but the star of the story isn’t as bleak as I wanted him to be.

This story is unfolding in such an organic way that I don’t know what’s going to happen. My lead is less “Batman” and more “Blue Beetle” or if you prefer less “Rambo” and more “John McClane”. I have no problem with that, but I can’t call this Smoke anymore. In fact I have to go back and rewrite the first few pages to lighten them up. Actually, I have to rewrite everything. I made the mistake of writing this as a first person narrative in the present tense. It’s very limiting. I need to make it past tense, but I won’t get into that now.

Expectations. I expected one thing and am writing another. This new story is coming out so much better than I could have hoped. Which brings me to my morale of the day.

As a writer, sometimes what you expect isn’t what you get, and what you get is more than what you expected.  That means you have to embrace those wild whims, even if they take you away from what you were working on before. Never be afraid to chase that White Rabbit. He is a big part of one of the greatest stories ever told after all. 

It may seem counter productive, and it is, but you may just end up striking on something hot. Which as a writer is what you, we, want. You want that one thing that just flows. This seems to be that for me, for now at least. Who knows when that White Rabbit will pass by again. Until then I’ll keep plugging away. Do the same.

That’s it all for this week. See you later.