It took a while, but i figured out that the problem was one of constraint. I had to shoe horn my characters activity into a pre-defined action. That did not sit well with my characters. They went sullenly where I sent them and reluctantly did what I asked of them. They did not sparkle, or laugh or throw fits and fall into them. No, they were good little characters and were as life-like as a cardboard cut-out.

I don’t want you to think that I think my characters are scintillating, heroic, immediately lovable characters. They may or may not be (and that is for the reader to decide), but our relationship, my characters and myself, has always been one of discovery. What are you going to do next, I would think as my fingers were poised over the keyboard and they would laugh and plunge into some fight, or stare agast at something in surprise and consternation. It did not matter, they lived in my imagination and that flowed onto the page and they were always a surprise to me, like discovering a new friend. You don’t know what they are going to do, until they do it.

But, mapping it out took all the wonder and surprise out of it for me and my characters. “Yes, yes, yes,” they would say. “You want me to go to Silven now, but I’m not ready. What, it doesn’t matter if I am ready? Alright, stop pushing at me, I’m going, I’m going.”

Once I realised that, I ripped the middle section of the book out and res-wrote it. Yes, it is better. The characters are much happier. In fact at one point, two of my characters and I had an intense disagreement. They were discussing where next to go and out it popped – SILVEN. “No, no, no,” I said to them. “You had your chance.” But did they listen to me? Nope. I kept erasing those lines and they kept re-appearing on the page. So I bowed to the inevitable. They wanted to go to Silven so I wrote about them going to Silven. It was a most disconcerting day of writing.