I’m currently working on a project where one of the main characters has to make her way through an underground cavern where there was no light. She was supposed to feel her way through the darkness, towards the exit. It marks something of a transition for the character, like all clumsy overused metaphors in stories do. But a strange thing happened while I was writing the scene. I threw in a line that just felt right and it totally changed things. You see, it turned out that she wasn’t alone in the cavern. She was supposed to be alone, but the story wasn’t happy with that. It turned out that, in the blackness, she wasn’t alone, and that made things much more interesting. Read more