| 8:55a |
brain, i have one
It's frustrating, sometimes, to stop plowing ahead with the story and think. Zero drafting--writing anything and everything, getting the ideas down, figuring out by writing--is an extremely valuable technique for me. However, after a point I have to stop and think. This last week was a deliberate thinking period, in which I forced my thinking into the back of my mind, in the hopes that my subconscious is smart. Saturday, I moved on to digging out those thoughts and laying them out in some kind of order. The list of scenes I made included both scenes I've already written and ones I needed to fill in holes, not to mention laying out the entire second half of the novel. Writing the scenes down, roughly in order, brought my attention to events that were logically missing, so I was able to insert more scenes into my list. Or in one case, leave a gap marked "stuff." I might not write all of these scenes, and I will probably add others as I go, but it's an excellent start. I detailed some of the scenes as the ideas came to me. Others are mere summaries, such as "Lucilla and Pascal part." I permitted myself some gaps of causality, in the hope that the answers will come to me, either after I write more or after I think more.
The hardest part is persuading myself it's just as valuable to stop and think as it is to plow ahead. Normally, it's not much of a problem, but being under deadline makes me a bit crazier than usual. |