Changing Your Story
One of the most frustrating challenges for me as a writer comes when I start writing a creative work with an idea or theme in mind and then find about halfway through that my original idea is no longer at all where the work is headed. I started writing a story about EVP a while back and honestly my original idea was to delve into the realm of horror a bit. Wouldn’t it be interesting, I thought, if EVP were actually caused not by dead relatives but rather by evil forces seeking to deceive the living into giving them awareness and power? In a matter of minutes, I had worked up a rough idea for a tale in which a young scientifically minded woman suffers through the death of her husband and ends up trying to record communication with him using a tape recorder. She ends up finding words on that tape, believes it to be her husband, and unwittingly gives power to an ancient unspeakable horror that has tapped into her sorrow. I found the whole idea to be deliciously tragic. After all, in the tradition of Lovecraft and all truly good horror, my heroine wouldn’t see the error until fate had already damned her.
Over the course of several days, I wrote the beginning framework for the short story, and I was really digging the results. I felt like I had really tapped into the feeling of despair one would feel after the loss of a recently-married spouse. I really felt the pain as I was writing it. In fact, at times, writing it was so intense that I had to put it down to pick it up the next day. The only problem came in when I finally got into the supernatural aspects of the tale. They just didn’t seem to fit. It wasn’t where the story was going, and I got immediately so annoyed with myself that I put the story down for a few months now.
Writers have this way of personifying their work. Anne Rice often talks about how her characters just kind of tell her what to write. I’ve heard other authors talk about how there’s a flow to a story that takes on a life beyond that of the writer. Unfortunately, my story is telling me that when my heroine finally overcomes her hopelessness and plays that tape, she’s not supposed to hear her dead husband whispering to her. No, she not supposed to hear anything. There’s supposed to be silence. As written, my supernatural elements just don’t belong. The story as it stands is a tale that reveals that no matter how much we want to bring the realm of fantasy into our lives to change unpleasantness in the end there’s only the concrete and the real.
It annoys me, I tell you.
Now I have to decide whether or not to let the story stand as is and change the ending to the one the work seems to want or whether I want to attempt a re-write of what I have. I always felt that the EVP was a cheesy mechanism for the larger tale, but I’m still reluctant to just drop my original idea. The story and I are at an impasse, and we’re not on speaking terms right now.