The parable of a character gone rogue

 For me, writing is a calling. But until writing the second Mid-Mississippi Valley Mystery, Midnight Mass Murder, which should be available the day after Thanksgiving, I didn't realize how writing fiction is a spiritual work that reveals a lot about how God fully knows us and how we also have independent agency, free will, to go in a direction He has not chosen- to go rogue. I've seen hints of this before when I've read or heard an author tell about how a character's choices shifted the story even though the character is a pure invention and the author is technically in charge.

The characters I thought I knew from the first book, Stuck In the Mud, bring their same issues and habits to Midnight Mass Murder, but as they interact with some of the new characters, they reveal things about their pasts, their opinions, and their motives that I did not plan. So, I find myself surprised and delighted by what is unfolding as well as sometimes dismayed and terrified. 

I realize that it is Psalm 139 unfolding and flowing out of my pen. I have created these characters. I thought I had intricately penetrated into the deepest layers of their hearts. I know them. I know how they respond. I know what they are thinking about. I know where they are going and when and even where they rest. I know what they are going to say, until they surprise me. But even then, like the psalmist recognizes, even if they take flight and go to the farthest edges of heaven or hell or the sea, they cannot escape from my observations. As the the author, I must answer the character's rogue revelation by asserting my intimate omniscience until they yield again to the current of the plot pulling them towards the conclusion of the story.

This makes me appreciate the love of God more. He doesn't interfere when we go rogue but neither does He abandon us to our rants and wanderings. He is with us. We can't escape His notice. He doesn't let anything destroy us before out time this woos us to Himself like nothing else. Let God search me and know my heart more fully than I can ever know one of my characters.