“The best part of the journey is the surprise and wonder along the way.” ― Ken Poirot

Yesterday was definitely a good writing day for me. I’d lost considerable ground on Tuesday due to a number of factors which upset my writing schedule. Thursday, though, saw me making up the last of the words I was behind and getting a little bit of a pad out there. More than that, though, I made some discoveries about my story.

I’m something of a pantser though I’ve managed to teach myself to do some planning before jumping off the noveling cliff. Still, there’s plenty of room for surprise and my hero managed to give me a fun yesterday. He was explaining to his father exactly why he didn’t want to go into the family business, and I couldn’t help thinking he was starting to sound too good and too noble. I’m talking boring good and noble, the type that might make the heroine — and the reader — go seeking a much more entertaining fellow.

Then his father responded to the impassioned speech with, “Do you have any idea what a pretentious, self-indulgent, entitled imbecile you sound like?”

No, not what I’d been expecting and it took the scene off in a completely different direction. It also opened up a whole set of possibilities for that relationship which will resonate throughout the book. None of it planned, none of it anything I knew would happen before my fingers moved across those keys.

And that’s the fun of it. We write first for ourselves, telling the stories we want to read but which no one has written yet. We have the joy of discovery, learning bits and pieces we didn’t know existed until they happen. Some will make it into the final manuscript while others will be discarded along the way. We have that joy, though, and that’s a reason to put ourselves through this, whether we take 30 days or 300.

Go. Write. Discover something wonderful today.