: Re: Identifying and managing weak scenes during planning I structured my plot, designed the path to the climax, listed my characters and even outlined some scenes. Then halfway through I got stuck:

@Kaufman555

Vote Up Vote Down

The characters in it couldn't possibly behave like I initially thought.

This was due to some nuances of the story that I developed while writing.

I think this is a natural and positive aspect of the 2-step writing process.

The creative writer throws darts blindly and hopes most of them land on a target of unknown shape and size, making them "good ideas" – darts that hit the wall are "bad ideas".

Next comes the critical writer whose job is to take off the blindfold, see which darts have actually hit, and methodically fill-in the shape with handplaced darts and remove the bad ones. Voilà, the writer appears to be a champion dart-thrower. He put on a blind fold and – yada yada – look at all these darts that hit the target! Meanwhile there's a kuroku stagehand who is doing half the magic that we pretend isn't there.

Discovery vs Plotting

Dean Wesley Smith claims he never re-writes, instead he re-drafts 3 times. He wrote books for existing movie franchises and also happens to be at least 2 people, so take his advice with a grain of salt, however he has the advantage of knowing exactly where he is in the writing process. Most discovery writers lean in this direction with long periods of uninterrupted creative flow.

Plotters alternate between creative and critical writing all through the process: short bursts of idea generation followed by editing – plotters don't re-write so much as fill in an outline with more and more granular detail. At some point they have to stop and that's when the novel is finished.

These are 2 ends of a spectrum. In reality we fall somewhere in-between: discovery writers make critical revisions as they go, and even chronic plotters have a final flow-only pass where new content is not permitted.

You outlined the important things but as you say this was a minor transition. I don't see any path around this. It could be any detail, any plot element, any out-of-character moment that was small enough to be missed during your outline/plotting/1st draft phase – regardless of your personal writing style. At some point the writer transitions from creative idea generation to critical (re)writing. I don't see how you could anticipate every issue during the first step, but you came to it eventually in step 2.

The frustration is that you need to shift to creative mode again to generate new ideas. The alternatives are to adamantly follow your outline, skip this part for now and come back to it later, or ignore it with confidence and hope the reader doesn't notice.

(0)

Login to post a comment!