Although my daughter says I have to learn to talk about ks rather than pages. But anyway, this is what I'm thinking and maybe you will comment. There are days when I walk into my office and have no idea what's going to happen next to my protagonist. Is this normal? There are other days when I know exactly. And when I look at the pages later, I can't tell the difference. The spontaneous action and the carefully planned action seem about the same. They both can suffer from a certain stasis and they both can seem fairly strong.
How often do you know exactly what you're going to write ahead of time? I'm not talking about an outline, just knowing in your head.
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5 comments:
I never know what's going to happen when I sit down at the word processor, but then I always think in terms of pages, too.
Our unconscious must know though. Or we dream about it. Some strange process and I'm glad I'm not the only one who doesn't have a concrete plan.
I rarely know what's going to happen when I sit down to write. Every once in a while I know a key scene is coming up, but they rarely ever turn out the way I expect.
I used to think in terms of page count, but then I found myself endlessly fooling with fonts and margins to make it bigger or smaller dependign on how the writing was going. I think things have gone much better for me since I started thinking in terms of word count. Though shorts I still think of in pages for some reason.
This is completely normal. You're in the, pardon the expression, "vomit draft" stage. It's all about just getting it onto the page and figuring out the story as you go.
Whether you're working off an outline, or you've run scenes in your head over and over, or if you're just using the writing to get it onto the page, it's all the same thing.
You're just doing your work on the page, rather than in your head beforehand.
For me, sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Right now I'm in the middle of rewrites and gutting the whole thing, but I know what I'm doing because I'm just reordering and fleshing out scenes.
I like the expression but due to my need to constantly rewrite rather than "vomit" it out, it doesn't quite work like that. What I do really like is the luxury of adding, adding, adding texture. At some point, I will have to subtract but for now....
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