"writers are always strange."
Dec. 5th, 2009 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aamcnamaraThe past couple of days proved to me that novels will tell you how to write them--you just have to listen very closely.
The scene I was writing earlier in the week was sort of fun, but it didn't quite seem to fit the rest of the novel. So yesterday I sat by the lake for a while, thinking about large-scale plotty aspects, and came up with, among other things, the big motivations for pretty much all of the major characters.
This morning I dragged out a notebook and wrote down a list of numbers for chapters, sketched in approximate wordcounts, and put in the major plot events. You should probably understand in this that I don't tend to work with outlines. For the novel I wrote this past summer, I did a couple of very very brief outlines, after about half the novel, just to get what was in my head down on paper.
This, on the other hand, was very much "all right, so this event should happen about twelve chapters in, and it should last about this long--okay, so there's a big blank space between these major events, what can happen here?". I invented new plot points, planned out what events would happen in which order and how many chapters they would span.
In the course of this, I discovered what the main hinge of the chapter I'm writing ought to be. Which necessitated a delete of the scene that I was writing earlier this week--about 800 words--and a new direction for the chapter. (At the moment I'm stalled on what the intermediary scene between this and the end-scene of the chapter ought to be, which probably means, Go back to the outline.)
It's sort of disorienting, working with an outline. In the normal way of things, I never would have thought, "Hmm. This scene isn't working, how about I write an outline?". But I was very quiet this morning, and the novel snuck up and whispered in my ear.
For posterity (that is, me at the beginning of the next novel, when I'm going "how could I possibly outline?"): the trick is, I think, that I like the characters enough as people that I'll follow them even though I know what's going to happen to them.
(In other news: It's snowing.)
The scene I was writing earlier in the week was sort of fun, but it didn't quite seem to fit the rest of the novel. So yesterday I sat by the lake for a while, thinking about large-scale plotty aspects, and came up with, among other things, the big motivations for pretty much all of the major characters.
This morning I dragged out a notebook and wrote down a list of numbers for chapters, sketched in approximate wordcounts, and put in the major plot events. You should probably understand in this that I don't tend to work with outlines. For the novel I wrote this past summer, I did a couple of very very brief outlines, after about half the novel, just to get what was in my head down on paper.
This, on the other hand, was very much "all right, so this event should happen about twelve chapters in, and it should last about this long--okay, so there's a big blank space between these major events, what can happen here?". I invented new plot points, planned out what events would happen in which order and how many chapters they would span.
In the course of this, I discovered what the main hinge of the chapter I'm writing ought to be. Which necessitated a delete of the scene that I was writing earlier this week--about 800 words--and a new direction for the chapter. (At the moment I'm stalled on what the intermediary scene between this and the end-scene of the chapter ought to be, which probably means, Go back to the outline.)
It's sort of disorienting, working with an outline. In the normal way of things, I never would have thought, "Hmm. This scene isn't working, how about I write an outline?". But I was very quiet this morning, and the novel snuck up and whispered in my ear.
For posterity (that is, me at the beginning of the next novel, when I'm going "how could I possibly outline?"): the trick is, I think, that I like the characters enough as people that I'll follow them even though I know what's going to happen to them.
(In other news: It's snowing.)