Day 7

[meteordust]

Word count:

Today - 1664
Total - 11719

Last year, I knew exactly what story I wanted to tell. It was something I'd been thinking about for a long time. I knew how it started and how it ended and a lot of what happened in between. So, when the time came to write it, I decided I would begin at the beginning and keep going until I reached the end.

That proved to be a mistake.

I know some people write by starting with a character or a situation and letting the story unfold from there. Me, I tend to think in terms of high points I want to include and what kind of impact I want them to have. The blood, sweat, and tears comes from trying to hammer it all into shape so that the arc of the story feels completely natural and inevitable. This generally takes a hell of a long time too.

So last year, I was trying to write a very structured, linear story, without the benefit of enough time to do the kind of shaping it needed. Not surprising, I got stuck.

This year, I decided to throw structured, linear storytelling out the window. Forget rigid plotting - hell, forget chronology. I'm writing the scenes that need to be written, without stressing over what order they're supposed to go in or what other scenes I'm going to need in order to connect them. No time for intricate planning now; I can always sew things together later.

And yeah, this new approach has helped me a lot so far. Not being locked onto one track keeps things exciting and fresh.

Comments

[thawrecka]

I've just been randomly writing scenes in a row and not worrying about plot. In fact, I'm not sure it's even heading towards a plot. It seems to ramble on like a soap opera.

[meteordust.livejournal.com]

Yeah, who needs plot anyway? We don't need to explain ourselves. We're making art!

[pelrun.livejournal.com]

Except for the most trivially short pieces, writing a story in one hit from beginning to end is the worst way to do it. Our brains are amazing pieces of equipment, but they just aren't capable of holding at once all the details necessary to make the result good. Nor can they plan things out at multiple levels simultaneously.

There's also motivation to consider. When you're all psyched up and overflowing with ideas, the *last* thing you want to do is to be stuck doing the important-but-boring-to-write links between your big scenes. You end up wasting time and energy on writing them that could be far better spent elsewhere, and when/if you finally make it to the next fun part you've forgotten half the things you wanted to try. Even worse, if you later decide to reorder your scenes, all that linking text has to be discarded and rewritten.

NaNoWriMo is primarily a brainstorming session. The whole point is give you the motivation to get your 50000 words worh of triumphs, tragedies, tender moments and the like down, and you can then use them as the building blocks of the novel you work on assembling in the months that follow. It's a lot easier to reorder scenes, to experiment, to drop things that aren't working and to insert new things - in essence, to do high level planning of your tale - if you haven't already glued half of it together haphazardly. You may even find a scene you wrote won't work in this story, but it may work in *another* one you write in the future. (The index cards work well here, if you write a small precis of a scene on each one.)

In other words, don't get ahead of yourself and try to do everything at once. Just focus on doing all the fun stuff now, and leave the rest till later :)

(There is a lot of similarity between programming and writing prose in this regard, even if one is written in an imperative mode and the other descriptive. I had to learn it the hard way :)

[meteordust.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's exactly it.

I feel like I should respond with more than a one liner, but I don't really have anything left to add. Your post pretty much sums it up.