Today is going to kick off three days of posts for Writer In Motion.
I’ve been so busy getting ready to kick off the holidays for my freelance work that I took some time away from Emmaline’s story. Part of this is because my current WIP is nagging me to death and I’m trying to figure out some particularly sticky spots, but also just life in general getting in the way of my writing time.
In this post I’m going to tackle what happens when readers want something different for your story than you do. This is something I haven’t brushed up against since my early years of writing when I still had no clue about story structure. Back then if someone said something didn’t work, I just assumed they were right and kept changing whatever didn’t quite function.
But this instance is more specific. On my very first Writer In Motion draft, I wrote a happy ending for Emmaline and Henry, defaulting to an archaic sword-wielding world which I’m more familiar with. This felt very off-key to me, so instead of fixing, I wrote a darker, more noir feel to the end that isn’t so happy and offered both to my readers and let them choose.
Though secretly I wanted them to choose the darker murderie ending. I should have remembered that my readers and I share one thing in common: if you make us cheer for a love interest and kill him at the end, we’ll probably burn your house down. Okay, that’s drastic . . . but we will have strong feelings. Really strong feelings.
So when my readers did exactly what I would have done in their position—chose the happier ending—I had to restrategize. I was maybe a tiny bit disappointed for about .0000215842265 seconds, but the more I thought about what readers want vs what I’d like to see happen in this story, the more I realized that I was looking at two different problems.
The first is that this story is way too short to effectively bring this tale into a full noir status. The second is that even if I wanted to pull it off as a darker Sin City style tale, I’d have to find a way to flesh out who Constance really is and what her role means to both Emmaline and Henry.
THE CLOCKS INSIDE has since become an origin story, and I want to give my readers their happy ending. But considering Emmaline’s emotional state, I wouldn’t call it a perfect ending. Already I can see how Emmaline, Henry and Constance will move into the future as a trio with a jaded history, and a full novel that explores the imperfections in their relationships and opens the door for murder, sex and greed.
All this to say, it was fun to explore the challenge of what readers wanted for the story versus where I’d like to take the tale. For now I’m happy to secede to the wish of my readers, but I make no guarantee this will always be the case with future stories.
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