the carrot and the stick
First, an FYI: I’m redoing the categories and tags for the site, trying to neaten them up. I apologize for any inconvenience.
Now, for the Deep Thoughts:
When I’m writing a first draft, I prefer to write it straight through rather than skip around in the timeline. I look on a first draft as a draft of discovery: this is where the characters tell you what’s going on with them, and I usually have good luck with this. I’ll discover things or think of things that I never would if I were following a strictly rigid outline. (All of my outlines, when I make them, always have a portion that says “some stuff happens here.” There’ll be plot before and plot after, but there’s always a nebulous space where I have to figure out how the characters get from Point A to Point C.)
Second- and later drafts are the place for tightening up plot and hunting down the loose threads, but while things often shift in later drafts they rarely change outright. (Of course, it helps in Romancelandia that your basic plot is still boy meets boy, boy loses boy, boy gets boy back. But like writing a sonnet, it’s what you do within that framework that’s the fun part.)
Point is, I rarely start something without knowing how it’s going to end (even if it’s just a vague “and then they happily ever after”), but I don’t always know how I’m going to get there. But it also happens a lot that I know exactly how it’s going to end, what’s going to be the plot climax, what’s going to be the catalytic event—sometimes the ending is what spurs me to write the story in the first place, because I want to figure out who these people are and how they got there.
When that happens, I have to ask myself: do I write the ending first and then go back and write the rest, or do I stick to what works and write the draft straight through? Usually I stick to what works, because it’s happened more than once that I’ll write the ending first and not feel any particular impetus to write the rest, because I’ve already written the good part.
Also, when I’ve written Point C first (or even Point B), and then have to go back and figure out how to make Point A fit, my inherent laziness kicks in and I think, Meh, I dun wanna. And so the story goes unwritten and is just another file in the Unfinished folder.
The risk with this, of course, is that when I’ve written Point A and Point B, I may not always remember what was so cracking good about Point C, even if I’ve made notes. (Which I do. Copious ones. My notebooks, dating back to my freshman year of college, fill a small bookcase—and that’s not counting the blank ones.)
Which (to show that I do indeed have a point) leads me here: I know exactly how I want the movie to end. I know the final sequence and the ending shot and the title card and the voiceover. I have notes about all these written down in one of the many notebooks I’ve been using on this project. (Why I have not chosen one and stuck to it, I couldn’t tell you—it’s like it’s too big to be contained by merely one.)
I want to write this so bad I can taste it.
But I’m trying to stay strong and get through the rest of the story before I get to the end, because writing that ending is my incentive to getting through all the hard parts—but, damn, it’s hard not to just say “I can always go back” and write the part I really want to. The hard parts will be very hard indeed: I get teary-eyed just thinking about them. I need something to make the hard parts worthwhile. It’s not just about reaching the page count, either, though that will be a good feeling; it’s about bringing the story to a satisfying conclusion, like a final summary of “this is what I’m trying to say.”
I was awake at some ungodly hour this morning (I have insomnia a few times a year) and thinking about this, and I thought, I could just get up and write it right now. And then everything that comes afterwards will be just building towards what I already have.
I didn’t, because I wanted to try and sleep more; but also because of all that above. I need that carrot on the stick. I need something to look forward to in order to get there.
Tags: bill aalto movie, writing process
Angie
I’m sort of like you and sort of not.
I can’t write out of order either. I hear about other writers who write whichever chapters or scenes they feel like banging out today and just go all O_O because that doesn’t compute at all for me.
My characters develop as I write them. Personalities, speech patterns, mannerisms and habits — all of it coalesces as I write. Sometimes I’ll be going along and get an idea for something the character is going to do, or for a bit of key backstory, or for a strong opinion or enmity or affinity, and if I’m writing along from beginning to end, this all braids in smoothly. Occasionally I’ll have to go back and scatter crumbs earlier, but not too often.
If I’ve already written Chapter 14, though, when I get a flash of characterization genius in Chapter 3, then there’s a good chance it’ll require some rewrites of Chapter 14. Maybe extensive rewrites. Maybe it’ll have to be completely trashed because nothing in it fits the story anymore.
Yuck.
I usually know where I’m going, too, at least in general, but it’s not set in stone until I get there. Sure, my romances are going to have reasonably happy endings, but that still leaves acres of wiggle-room. If I take a sharp left in Chapter 8 then the end (Chapter 26) might well end up very different from the hazy scene in my head when I started out. Writing out of order would feel strangling, like I was either committing to something that I’d really rather not do now, or frustrating, because I’d end up tossing however many thousand words as complete waste when they were superceded by earlier developments.
I start at the beginning and keep going to the end, and I can’t imagine writing any other way.
Angie
Jenna
I don’t think even tossed-out scenes are a waste, though: even if they don’t end up in the finished story they can still inform what does. But yeah, I’d rather use what I’ve written than just write something that will only end up being dropped.