A Goodreads user asked Graeme Simsion:

Graeme, congratulations on your most innovative books - you may remember me when I was CIO of SE Sydney Health. In your Rosie books, did you see the characters diverge from your original plot, shaping the outcome? In my books, fiction, and currently history, I find the characters have a major influence on the story line. Or do you manage to stay very close to your original outline and direction? Bryn Evans, Sydney.

Graeme Simsion Great to hear from you - it's easy to lose touch with people from my previous life, though I've done keynotes at a couple of data conferences in the last few months - along the lines of "things I learned in IT that helped me write a novel" or "things I learned in writing a novel that I'd use if I went back to IT". In fact I'm doing a talk at the Australian Computer Society in Sydney on Nov 6. And I gather you're now in the writing world too, if you were not before. I plan my story in advance - what do you expect from an ex ITer? - but I find that being true to the characters often requires me to change it substantially as I write and revise, particularly the final 25% of the story. At this point, you've put characters and events in place, and there's often a certain inevitablity to what must logically follow, even if that isn't what was planned. In THE ROSIE PROJECT, my original plan had a different outcome for the father project…

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