Characters Behaving Badly

I've heard lots of writers say that when they write a book, they develop the characters, put them in a situation and see what the characters do. Then they write about it.
     For years I thought that was ridiculous. It's my story. I created the characters. They will do what I decide they do. My characters have since taught me to think otherwise.
     When I started my novel, Daylight's End, my premise was that the main character, Helen, finds a vacant, neglected, supposedly haunted plantation home that she falls in love with and buys. Once she moves in she meets the very real, opinionated and possessive ghost, Patrick, who refuses to let anyone live there.
     They met in the first paragraph, when Patrick walked up from the cellar to join Helen in the living room on her first night in her new home. In the middle of page two, Helen tells Patrick he doesn't fit her idea of a ghost, he tells her he's a vampire.
     What? Stop. Cut. Rewind. Where did that come from? I'm not writing about a vampire. (This was before I knew there were novels that featured vampires. I am now a huge fan of paranormal fiction, but back then I'd never heard of it.)
     I told Patrick, (should I have noticed how real this character was to me when I started talking to him?) "Go back to the cellar, if that's where you wanna hang out, and come back and say your lines right."
     Patrick wasn't having any. He said he was a vampire and I could deal with it. I said he could stay a vampire and languish in a desk drawer for the rest of his undead existence. I then put the "manuscript", all one and a half pages of it, in a folder in my file cabinet.
     That was in 1997. In 2002, I once again came across this less than two page "manuscript" and decided I should never have created two ornery characters and left them alone in a drawer together for five years. As I re-read through the few paragraphs, I realized they, Helen and Patrick, had kept right on talking and gotten mixed up in all kinds of trouble. And they distracted me so much I couldn't focus on any other writing project.
     I finally wrote their story so they would shut up and I could move on to something else. But they never stopped. They kept getting into trouble together and two books and a dozen short stories later - with a growing cast of unusual characters - they are leading me into a third book.
     Another thing I've heard is that when characters are real enough to the writer that they do and say what they will and the writer just has to follow along, the characters become real to the reader. Even though the characters don't do what the author thinks they should, real characters are a good thing.

www.jennifermballard.com
www.daylightsend.weebly.com
www.trustindarkness.weebly.com.