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Apr. 11th, 2006 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
turpsI have a writing question o friends list.
How do you approach writing a story? Do you start at the beginning and keep going to the end? Hop around filling in scenes where needed? Something else?
See, I'm writing something that's pretty long, but have a scene that's buzzing inside my head. Thing is, that scene won't happen until much further into the story and I just don't work that way. I start at the beginning and write until the end. I can't imagine having a scene just sitting there waiting to be joined to the main story, but, it wants to get out so badly. I can feel the words on the tips of my fingers and it's annoying me. Plus, there's the real fear I'll forget what I wanted to write if I push them back.
So, I ask others how they write while I wrestle with what to do.
How do you approach writing a story? Do you start at the beginning and keep going to the end? Hop around filling in scenes where needed? Something else?
See, I'm writing something that's pretty long, but have a scene that's buzzing inside my head. Thing is, that scene won't happen until much further into the story and I just don't work that way. I start at the beginning and write until the end. I can't imagine having a scene just sitting there waiting to be joined to the main story, but, it wants to get out so badly. I can feel the words on the tips of my fingers and it's annoying me. Plus, there's the real fear I'll forget what I wanted to write if I push them back.
So, I ask others how they write while I wrestle with what to do.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 11:02 pm (UTC)It's good!
Don't you get all mixed up with the story in your head though?
Not usually in a big way. Although fairly often little inconsistencies appear, like leaving in a mention of Joey being with the others in the post-Apocalypse when he'd already left to look for Kelly, because I'd moved that scene around. I usually catch them when I'm reading through, but sometimes they slip by.
Stories have an overall shape in my head, which is really hard to describe without sounding completely insane. It's sort of a floating, glowing ball I can 'feel', like I'm holding it. When a story is working, it's round and smooth. When something's wrong with the plot, it doesn't feel right -- it's out of shape, or a weird texture. I get the strongest sense of it when I come up with a fix for something that was wrong, and the stry suddenly feels a much better shape. (I get the same thing when I'm betaing, where the shape builds up as I read, and it feels either wrong or right.)
I can do it all logically too, by thinking about whether the end's tying up to the beginning, and whether the characters are developing over the story, and whether I'm carrying through any themes or plots I've kicked off, and whether X or Y needs more foreshdowing, etc. But I do rely somewhat on whether the shape of the story just feels smooth and complete.
I worry if I wrote in sections I'd end with a tangled mess that made no sense.
For long stories, I sometimes write a timeline (which is really just a list of scenes, but timeline sounds more professional :-) I need them more for action-adventure or detective plots where I have to keep track of events, but less so for relationship-focused stories because it's easier to hold the shape of those in my head even when they're quite large. So I had quite a lot of timelines for some of my original stuff, which was very plotty and exactly what happened when mattered a lot. And I have one for the post-Apocalypse.
I suppose it's like a journey. Key points you pass and the travel between each one.
The problem though, as Pen said, is that with writing like that you can get to all the lovely scenic bits right away, and then in the end you have all the boring motorway driving inbetween left and no motivation to do it :-)