Thanks

Robert E Howard said something similar about writing Conan.

I write from outline, but the outline mutates as the characters grow. Near the end of the novel I’m trying to flog, there’s a point where the good guys would logically – because they are Medievals – try to torture information out of one of the antagonists. In the original outline, the hero’s barbarian henchmen were pencilled in to do the knife work. But the love interest/female protagonist just sort of piped up:

***
She drew her long dagger and probed the air in front of the fat cleric’s right eye. “Hold him firm.”
Osmund glanced at Ranulph for confirmation.
Ranulph coughed. “Lady Maud—”
“What?” she said. “He planned to burn me alive. He offered me to his mercenaries to #### to death – or have you forgotten?”

* * *
It’s one of those things that makes writing feel worthwhile.

There is a scene in my first novel where the main character, trying to understand whether she has been inexplicably transported back in time or possibly to some form of afterlife, decides she has to know something before she can continue:

Melina pushed on. There was no delicate way to put the question, and she thought she might appear mad to ask, but she knew that if she could not ask it of this unassuming child-man then she could never ask it of any of those assembled below. “Are you–everyone here– Are you all ghosts?”
The servant’s eyes and mouth balanced between the familiar smile and a frown. But he mastered whatever emotion might have gained sway and said, with no expression whatsoever, “Milady, we are prisoners.”

Not only was that not what I expected the servant to say but it was not what I had *intended* for him to say.

But, of course, it was far better than what I had planned.

– Sully

David