My regular readers (all three of you) will notice that I haven’t posted in a week. Part of this is life. I’ve been hyperbusy and that doesn’t look like it’s going to let up anytime soon. I’ll get my next day off on the 24th, and people are already scrambling to claim some my time on that day as well.
But more than just being busy, I could have squeezed in time to write if I really wanted to. I didn’t. Something about the way I was approaching the story didn’t fit. It was not unlike trying to put an oblate spheroid (like the rock you’re sitting on zipping through space) into a round hole. It almost fit, but not quite. Something was Wrong.
And at this stage of the project, something Wrong can be very Wrong indeed, as missteps here can become greatly magnified a year and 80,000 words in. So I stepped back and looked at what I was doing, and realized that working backwards doesn’t really work for me.
I’ve tried a number of different ways to write fiction over the years. I’ve tried the King/NaNoWriMo method of just starting with characters and a situation and seeing what happens, digging up King’s fossil. I’ve tried writing detailed outlines that, for me, freeze the life out of the story. And now I’ve tried writing from the end to the beginning. All three of those methods have good aspects, reasons they work for other writers. But none really fit the way I think.
In a lot of ways, I think like a sculptor. Start with a broad and unfocused vision, then refine it over several passes of incremental changes. But even at the start, the whole is visible. The rest is detail.
I generally know the overall shape of my story when I start. I know how it starts, how it ends, and key moments to hit in between. So maybe that’s how I should write it.
My next step is to come up with the core of Revelation, not much more than a bulleted list. Just the major steps, key turning points in the novel. Then I’ll fill in the connecting scenes between them, but not too much. Once I have my “outline” (likely to be less than a full typed page, even for a whole novel), I’ll start composition. That and a firm knowledge of my characters should be all I really need.
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