Other writers have talked about ‘breaking’ their characters, usually by accidentally making a character do something that’s so against their personality that the story grinds to a halt. I get the impression that sometimes, this leaves the writer and character glaring at each other and arguing. The words, ‘you can’t make me!’ might get thrown around- by either half of the argument. It’s a mess, and requires a lot of work by the writer to turn the ship around and get back on track.

I’ve been dabbling in a variation on this phenomenon for a while, and recently turned it into a purposeful writing exercise. Instead of breaking the characters, I’m letting them break the scene itself.

I wouldn’t recommend doing this exercise with every story, but the time travel WIP is well-suited to it. This WIP is a character-driven story with a slow burning romance subplot. The FMC and MMC meet a few times over the course of a few years before they get together, and they both change quite a bit during that time (her slightly more than him, because she’s at a different stage of life and her brain is more plastic). Thus, their interactions have vastly different tones, not only because each meeting is under different circumstances; they’re very much different people each time they meet.

So I’ve thought about it and written a few scenes that I was pretty sure didn’t belong in the story, asking myself, ‘how would it go if they got together at a different point in the story?’ and its more subtle cousin, ‘could they even be friends at this point in the story?’ and the results have been interesting. Getting together after their first meeting would have been a disaster. There simply wasn’t enough time for them to build mutual trust and confidance away from the interference of other well-meaning people (she’s pretending to be eighteen (she’s really thirty-three or thirty-four) and he’s twenty-six, so her family behaved as you’d expect a loving family to behave). He’s at a point in his arc where he really wants someone to love, but he kept thinking of her as a kid who’d been through a traumatic experience, and trying to hover. She kept getting annoyed with him because, see above about how old she really is.

Getting together after their second encounter was a non-starter. I thought the third time had more promise, but nope. He still thought she was too young/inexperienced and needed to be hovered over, and she couldn’t figure out how to talk to him as an equal.

It was only after they’d been deployed together and both copped some pretty serious injuries- and had some rather lively arguments- that these two knuckleheads finally decided they were friends, then got together in a way that led to a serious, healthy, lasting relationship- which is the point of this type of romance arc. Those scenes didn’t break the characters, nor did the characters break the scene, which means they’re probably the main story, not an offshoot.

Writing out these little scenes could be seen as a waste of time- I certainly haven’t writing anything publishable lately- but if I look at it in terms of learning and practicing the craft of writing, it becomes more reasonable. It’s an investment. And it really brought home the necessity of relative equality between the two characters, before they could embark on a healthy relationship. She needed to learn to trust him, and he needed to see her as a fully-grown adult (which she’s been for the entire time, because of the time travel; he just didn’t know it). They also needed to spend more time in a place that wasn’t ‘his’ or ‘hers’, where they could get to know each other with pre-set external boundaries and people who care about them but won’t interfere with their developing friendship.

The whole thing has been a fun exercise, and a strange one. I don’t usually set out to write scenes that I know will flop, just so I can analyze what went wrong, but, why not? I have a better sense of the characters involved, the way the story should go, and why they broke each scene the way they did. And I don’t have characters standing there, glaring at me and going, ‘you can’t make me!’

Much better all around.

Am I the only one who does this? How have you accidentally broken a character or a scene? Have you ever done it on purpose? How did you get the story back on track afterward?