The Surprise and Delight That is Letting Your Characters Lead
So, I am a planster. I have a beginning, and an ending, and I fill the middle of a story with the steps to get from A to B. But it's very much chaotic, where I don't know the steps until I hit them a bit with my foot, and I don't know how many steps there are until I make it to the top and have a view of the path I took to get there. I stumble through first drafts, and immediately turn around to descend the stairs and start again. But this time there's less meandering, more direct routes, and a sprinkling of warnings around what things are coming to trip up our characters. This is how I write.
And I have seen many posts by published and successful authors talking about how this is not the way. Plan it out, know your characters, ask questions like what food would they like and what's their favorite song, know the landscape, your flora and vegetation, government structures and even how characters on different planets use the bathroom. Those are things you must know before sitting down or you will inevitably waste time, words, and maybe walk yourself into a problem you cannot get out of.
It's impossible for me to do this, at this point in my life not only bc the brain I have works in a sort of circuitous fashion (as you can see by the meandering of this blog post) but also because it would eliminate my favorite part of writing which is: when my characters surprise me.
I cannot fathom how I could possibly plan out an entire story, with all the emotional beats, knowing how my characters would interact in a specific scene or react to a bit of dialogue. I just can't know all that, not unless I am standing in the room with them, hearing the words being spoken to them, feeling their reaction to them. I have to be there to know, and I have found the most insightful bits about my characters in these unplanned moments. This is precisely the reason I've never considered myself a creative person before two years ago.
Now, I won't lie, I WISH I could write this way, especially right now where every chapter in my manuscript feels like it could be a tragic error towards getting to the end. Writing this way would indeed result in much stronger works, if I were able to hyperfixate on the details so much that I had it all planned out. But, despite admittedly being someone who loves plot, I write for characters. To tell their stories, share their pain and joy, and show how they overcome things that would otherwise undo them. When I write, it's always for the characters.
And to me, removing that surprise means fitting my characters into a box, it means taking away their agency, and eliminating a bit of their depth and soul. And I can't possibly imagine doing that. I love my characters too much, and the joy I experience when getting to know them while I'm writing is my favorite part.