Sometimes you decide to write a story – you name your characters, decide where they are going to live, give them a career, a family, ambitions, fears. You call the shots.
Sometimes a story informs you that it needs to be written – a character wanders into your head and introduces themselves, they have a name, they know what they want and are fairly sure they know how to get it.
Sometimes they are Russian.
Seriously, I sat down today to try and come up with an idea for my Writer’s Club homework task and a Russian girl called Katya flounced into my head, sat down and told me how things were going to go.
She didn’t just stop at planning my Writer’s Club story for me though, oh no, she continued and also made it into a plan for a short story competition prompt I had looked at recently.
But she’s Russian. In Russia. A tiny bit of Russia I didn’t know existed until earlier today.
Partly it’s great to have everything plotted out for you before you start, partly it’s a total pain because, when it comes down to it – I don’t know the slightest thing about deepest, darkest Russia apart from what Miss Katya has told me.
Better get researching then, hadn’t I?
Comments on: "Why Russia?" (4)
That’s wonderful. It’s almost as if you aren’t a creative writer, you’re a reporter, and you’re telling the story of this Russian girl and her life in this little town no one’s heard of. I like the idea that the characters already exist, they’re just waiting for you to find them. Or better yet, the chance to introduce themselves. What a neat thought!
It was much easier for Tolstoy and Dostoievsky huh?! But the concept of these people already existing and waiting for the chance to be introduced… genius!
Have fun researching.
That’s cool though. I need to get my mind back in a place where characters just show up.
[...] Do you remember back in January I wrote a post about a young Russian girl called Katya? [...]