and he turns out to be someone who collects sports cars from the 1960s. WHAT!Suddenly you spend an hour or more identifying sports car from his era. You know nothing about this subject. Where did he come from? Where does his hobby come from?
When this happens to you in your writing, do you slam the door on him and his research-demanding hobby, regard him as someone trying to hijack your plot? Or do you go with it, even if you must now spend an hour or more looking at cars online?
Are you suspicious about whether this is a good sidebar for your story? Do you ever wonder if you're looking for a way to go online and fool around instead of cranking out words? Is he a ridiculous diversion or a gift from your unconscious?
9 comments:
I'd consider it a gift. At least it's something that's easy to research. Better an interest in cars than astrophysics :)
Write on Sister!
But I don't even drive. So it's like astrophysics.
Really? This makes this VERY interesting, indeed.
I'm with Lisa, never look a gift from the muse in the mouth, so to speak. My DH knows lots about cars including cars of the 1960s, so give me a shout if you need help.
Linda
Thanks, Linda. I may need help. But I think someone's gonna steal the lot pretty fast.
I will always go with it because something deep inside of me brought it to the surface. Unless there is a bit of knowledge the new character has that is crucial to the plot, I don't stop writing and start researching. I leave blanks in the script to be filled in later. When I wrote my first book set in 1944, I kept stopping and researching. It slowed my writing down. Halfway through the book, I just put in blanks and found the answers later, when I wasn't writing.
Yeah, that's what my daughter does but I'm neurotic and can't move forward until the blanks are filled in.
This sounds a lot like the threads off the main storyline that I take once in awhile. Sometimes they help, but most often they have to be cut out because they do nothing to the story except drag it down.
Perhaps, Patti, if you do not do this often this may be a message that you are to go with this.
A problem for me is that I will struggle to make it fit.
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