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Amazon Exclusive: Sarah Graves on Crawlspace People sometimes ask me whether my characters ever “take over the plot.” By that, they mean characters refusing to do what I’d planned for them, so that I end up having to write some other book–or even none at all. I usually answer humorously (I hope) that this is the handy thing about writing mysteries, that characters who don’t do what I wish simply end up meeting their deadly fates much sooner than they expected. But the truth is, it’s not as easy as that, so let me try explaining with an analogy, like… riding a horse. (Yes, I would use a hammering-a-nail analogy, if it worked. But it doesn’t. How I wish it were as simple as nail-hammering!) Anyway: Writing a novel is a little like holding the horse’s reins. One rein is plot, the other character. And while I try to have a good grasp on the plot before I begin writing, and on the characters before I write them, inevitably characters have (more…)