Right Characters, Wrong Story

You know the feeling. The pages are coming slow. You like the voice, the tone, the setting. But something isn’t working. You write a scene that’s supposed to be tender and it lands flat. Your beta readers don’t buy the emotional climax. A romance fizzles instead of catching. It’s not that the prose is broken the story just doesn’t work.

It's not always easy to know which you did...

I’ve had characters show up with voices fully formed. Their mannerisms are precise. I know how they take their coffee (or blood in this case), what they think about God, what memory they refuse to discuss. They are complete on the page. But I handed them the wrong story.

In this case, Lavinia had lived for over a century. A vampire, yes, but more than that. A woman who’d watched empires crumble, who spoke six languages and hated four of them, who remembered being alive when horses pulled hearses and whose hands still remembered how to thread bone needles. She was strange and sharp and tired.

And I tried to write her flirting with a fellow ancient.

It failed spectacularly. Nothing clicked. The romantic interest read as shallow. Their connection felt unearned. A beta reader said, “I don’t believe she’d fall for him, and frankly I don’t want her to.” One said, “You built someone brilliant and then stuck her in a TV show.” Retract blade from heart please…

It wasn’t that the character was bad. Or even that the writing was bad. I’d written her voice exactly the way I heard it in my head. She was consistent, clear, frightening. But the story didn’t work and unfortunately the romantic element was tied to so many other parts of the tale the whole tale started to fall down around it. She was too old for a first kiss to matter. She’d seen too much for puppy love to satisfy.

I loved her. The readers didn’t. Because I put her in the wrong story.

As authors, we want so badly to make it work that we try to twist the story around the idea we started with. We patch, and polish, and write ourselves into narrative corners because we want it to be right. But sometimes, what a character needs is not a different scene, or a different arc, but a completely different book.

So, I pulled her out.

I closed the manuscript. I didn’t delete it, God no! But I let it go. I started asking whole new questions about her character arc. Turns out, it wasn’t toward love. It was toward responsibility. Toward guilt. Toward legacy and loss. Toward the dangerous seduction of power, and the loneliness of seeing the world too clearly. That better is the one I’m telling now.

There’s a freedom and pain in admitting you miscast someone. That your brilliant violinist isn’t meant for a love triangle, but for a murder mystery. That your dry-humored exorcist is better suited for a noir than a tragedy. You don’t always have to kill your darlings. But you might have to move them.

If I have any advice for writers tangled in a manuscript that won’t work, look not at what you love, but where you’ve placed it. That magnetic, complicated character in your head? They may be begging for a different stage.

That might mean rebuilding the story, from scratch, brick by brick, around the character who won’t leave your head. They deserve that much. And maybe, once you’ve found the right plot, you’ll get to see what they’ve really been trying to say all along.