"do you ever find your characters almost outright refusing to go where you
want them to? this happens to me from time to time, where I want her to
go one way, and she decides to go another. It's rather annoying."

Yes, but it means you're doing it *right*.

Yeah, it happens. Every once in a while, a character will go left instead
of right in my head, and I'll try to yank him back, and he'll refuse to
go, and I'll get into this sort of weird mental dialogue trying to find
out what the hell's wrong and what's going on. I've now created the
characters sufficiently well now that they're alive, and I've come to that
point now where, if a character says "I want to do X" in a script, I'll
tend to go with it, figuring it may work and take me in some new
directions. Every once in a while, we'll get to the end, and it won't
work, and I'll have to backtrack to where we went off the road...and,
natch, the character just sits sullenly in the back of the car, refusing
to admit he read the map wrong.

But when it *works*...the character surprises me, and if I'm surprised,
the odds are good that you're going to be surprised.




jms