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Forks in the Road
Oct. 29th, 2011 11:49 amFirst of all, sorry for the lapse in blog posts. I just had a baby, so it took a while to get back into a routine that allows "superfluous" writing like blogging. I'm still in grad school, so I've had to keep up with classwork and thesis submissions with a newborn, and the blog was one of the things I just couldn't handle. But my daughter is sleeping 4-5 hours a night and I've finished thesis submissions for this semester, so I should have more time now. Plus, NaNoWriMo starts on Wednesday next week, so I'll have plenty of fodder for blogging!
On to the subject of this post:
Writing can (and should) be a voyage of discovery. Like all journeys worth taking, writing requires sweat produced in hours of slogging through (metaphorical) mud, tears of frustration and joy, blood spilled in ripping out our hearts and pasting them to the page, and an open mind for those times when the course shifts unexpectedly.
I just had an unexpected shift in my novel. I won’t write about what it was because it’s a pretty big spoiler and I’m going to do my damnedest to get this novel into print within a year or so, but it’s one of those shifts that changes everything. I totally didn’t see it coming and it’s going to influence some major plot points in the third book of my trilogy. I’d been setting it up unconsciously the whole time I was writing the book, and I’m only going to have to make a few minor changes to make it work perfectly.
In the writing world, people generally identify as “plotters” or “pantsers” (plotters make outlines and write synopses, pantsers just take an idea and run with it), but I tend to fall somewhere in between. Maybe I’m a plotser? I work through my ideas with outlines and such, but once I start to write I let the story grow organically, even if it wants to go somewhere that I never imagined in the synopsis. I know when changes like that occur that I’ve succeeded. I’ve hooked into something living and breathing, something exciting. And if I’m excited, my readers will be, too. Can’t you tell when an author was bored or disinterested in their work? And isn’t it so much better to feel enthusiasm? Yeah, I think so, too.
On to the subject of this post:
Writing can (and should) be a voyage of discovery. Like all journeys worth taking, writing requires sweat produced in hours of slogging through (metaphorical) mud, tears of frustration and joy, blood spilled in ripping out our hearts and pasting them to the page, and an open mind for those times when the course shifts unexpectedly.
I just had an unexpected shift in my novel. I won’t write about what it was because it’s a pretty big spoiler and I’m going to do my damnedest to get this novel into print within a year or so, but it’s one of those shifts that changes everything. I totally didn’t see it coming and it’s going to influence some major plot points in the third book of my trilogy. I’d been setting it up unconsciously the whole time I was writing the book, and I’m only going to have to make a few minor changes to make it work perfectly.
In the writing world, people generally identify as “plotters” or “pantsers” (plotters make outlines and write synopses, pantsers just take an idea and run with it), but I tend to fall somewhere in between. Maybe I’m a plotser? I work through my ideas with outlines and such, but once I start to write I let the story grow organically, even if it wants to go somewhere that I never imagined in the synopsis. I know when changes like that occur that I’ve succeeded. I’ve hooked into something living and breathing, something exciting. And if I’m excited, my readers will be, too. Can’t you tell when an author was bored or disinterested in their work? And isn’t it so much better to feel enthusiasm? Yeah, I think so, too.
