Is it possible to shoot electricity through the air without it diverting straight down?

Question

So I’m a writer and I know that electricity finds the best way to get away from itself (such as diving head first into the nearest patch of ground) and avoiding insulators when possible (such as, unfortunately for my purposes, air). So I wanted to know if there was any way to make electricity get tricked or something into moving through air so you could aim it as a weapon of some sort? Even like a broad one? I did a lot of research and found something about Electrolasers that make a plasma path or whatever, but I didn’t really get that. I also found out about Positive and Negative lightning, so made a pseudoscience idea of them chasing each other in like a lightning tornado, but I wanna know if there’s a real and understandable way to make it work or not (current technology is irrelevant, theoretical yet realistic tech is fair game!)

Answer 1

"Electricity" loosely defined is the flow of electrons. Typically electrons need something to flow through, a medium if you will. Lighting strikes conduct massive amounts of electricity through the air because enough voltage is developed in a storm cloud to cause a massive arc or lighting bolt to exist for a few moments from two oppositely charged points, usually one of them being on the earth but cloud to cloud lighting does exist. It takes an extremely high voltage and lots of power to do that! The path, the source and the end targets are all fairly random points. Trying to direct that kind of natural power would be nearly impossible however, it's easy to direct lots of power if the power is contained in an RF or radio frequency field. It's easy to direct lots of power in a fairly well defined and contained envelope. Humans have been doing that for over 100 years.