LKH Lashouts

Yeah. I actually think Janet Evanovich is being overly hostile to what's a perfectly good term. I really think most authors who say that kind of thing actually mean that, caught up in the story, they wrote something that they didn't originally intend because it suddenly struck them that it would be a good idea, or realized that something they originally meant to do wouldn't be in character and needs to be changed. When everybody knows that (and I think most people do understand that, when the author isn't being generally insane), "they did something that surprised me" is as valid a thing to say as any other metaphor. If somebody pulls a stupid joke on me and instead of saying "Sorry, I saw the opportunity and I thought it would be too funny to let it go by," says "Sorry, the devil made me do it," I'm not going to start arranging for an exorcism.

The thing about LKH is a) she sounds like she means it, b) she does it while completely dismantling the characters, whereas normally this is associated with natural character development, c) she talks as if this is something that keeps her from doing bad things to her character. The number one rule of trying to find that happy medium is that you're getting into their heads trying to find what the characters would do, not to find what the characters want to happen and then abandon reality in the rest of the universe to hand it to them/protect them. What characters want is relevant only to motive for their own actons.