My tenth grade creative writing teacher said “Start with a good idea and the story will write itself.”

I called bullshit. He replied “I didn’t say it would be a well written story. Or even a good story. Pay attention. I’m trying to teach you about ideas flowing.”

He went on to talk about not being constrained to your own ideas of a beginning, middle and end when you start a story. Sometimes things will happen as you are writing that you didn’t anticipate. Your story might take a turn you didn’t know was there. When that happens, you don’t stop and make the story go in the original direction. You go with it. Sometimes the story knows more than you, he said.

He was right. I started to get looser with my writing, letting the ideas flow from a starting point without being locked in to where I thought the story would go. What he taught me stayed with me through all my writing, whether it was articles for the college newspaper sports column, essays, short stories or, later on, even blog posts. I never outline. I rarely have an ending in mind. I let the story flow.

Now I’m in the latter half of the novel I’m writing and I’m constantly surprised by what’s happening. When I killed off one character last week, I had no idea that was going to happen until it did.

Last night I was at a crucial point, one which would begin a climax  - and when I talk about this I always see in my mind the chart all my writing teachers showed us about plot development. So I’m climbing the peak of plot development. I’m pretty sure I know what’s going to happen because it’s been played out in my mind a thousand times already.

I stop writing. I stare at the screen. I’m having a hard time scaling that peak. Something else wants to happen. A little voice inside my head - which sounds suspiciously like the voice of my tenth grade creative writing teacher - says, sometimes the story knows more than you. I go with the flow. I start writing again.

As with the death of the other character, what this character does takes me by surprise. It’s not anything I had in mind and it’s nothing I would have ever considered. But it’s right. It’s good. The story knows.

I write a few more paragraphs then sit back and read what I just wrote. It’s like it was supposed to be this way all along. She was supposed to be bad. I go back to earlier chapters and you can see it in the things she does, the words she uses.

This is the most I’ve ever written for one story. I’ve produced hundreds upon hundreds of short stories and probably thousands of creative essays over the course of my life. Being almost 50,000 words into a novel is, well, a novel thing for me. You would think after spending every single day writing this, all these words, all these ideas, that I would know my characters. But I don’t. They are their own entities because I’ve chosen to let the story write itself, so to speak.

If my creative writing teacher didn’t spend an entire semester teaching us about flow and not being tied down to our original ideas and trusting our imaginations, this novel would probably be done and I wouldn’t be happy with it.

I just googled my teacher’s name and found a blog post from someone who also took his creative writing class, probably within a few years of the time I did. But I found nothing else on him. I’d like to look him up and thank him.

I just realized this post had no point.