When the Plan Changes

Plans are great. I love a good plan. Character sheets, story outlines, world building, design references — it all helps bring a project into focus. When I started developing The Summer We Started a Robot War, my main character Ember was designed as a fox. The design worked. The personality worked. Everything felt like it was clicking.

Then my daughter told me something.

One of the main characters in The Wild Robot is also a fox.

Now, that doesn’t mean foxes are off limits forever, but it did make me pause. When you're building something new, the last thing you want is for readers to immediately connect your character to someone else's story. So instead of ignoring the problem, I treated it like part of the creative process.

Creativity is really just problem solving with imagination.

I started sketching again. What if Ember wasn’t just a fox? What if the character represented something different? Eventually the idea landed: Ember isn’t a purebred anything — he’s a mutt. A mix of fox and dog. A little wild, a little domestic. A character that doesn’t fit neatly into one box.

Which, when you think about it, feels pretty relevant.

So the plan changed. And now I will have to update Ember’s profile page, but honestly, he feels like a better character now.

That’s the funny thing about creative work: the plan gets you started, but the adjustments along the way are often where the best ideas show up.

See you in a few Sundays.