Ack ack

Well, that was a failure.

Spent the morning cleaning up and revising some scenes. Then several hours poking around for more information on ATS uniforms and assignments and all that.

After lunch drafted five hundred words. The wrong words. The bit is too much and it drags the flow of the story off. Wrote a brand-new two-hundred word version. And, oops, now I was missing some character beats I really wanted to keep. Spliced and diced and came up with a four-hundred word version that builds on the character beats and doesn't dwell so much on the descriptions.

And realized it was the wrong approach altogether. There shouldn't be a scene there at all. I needed to offload all of those beats into the following scenes.

So that's where I stand now as I break for dinner; 114 words of the current chapter. Which is projected to hit 1200 to 1400.

Okay, the other reason for the break is that means I have to do the Home Guard now. So read up on their uniforms and so on and so forth. I bought a book a while back. Still haven't had time to read more than the opening chapters.

***

Of course. I'm getting better at recognizing block. There are times you just need a break from writing. There are also times when the block is your brain telling you the scene isn't working.

Pity the line at the grocery store wasn't longer. I read as much of one of my books as I could. And watched more of a couple history programs. And took some time off to play Fallout and watch Eureka and that's what I needed.

This morning I was finally able to recognize the scene didn't work and what it was missing. And took a long walk to hammer out new ideas. And now I have a plan. It might not work. But if it does I'll have a much stronger scene than I would otherwise. And if it doesn't? Well, I'll still be ahead because I know I need something, and I've had this scene circulating around long enough so I can grok it.

And I can't help but think of this in terms of the "write it first, then fix" philosophy I've been seeing a lot of people arguing for. Sure; I didn't know the scene was wrong until I tried it. But at the same time, I didn't have to write the whole scene to find out. For me, it would be a waste of time to write the whole book without adjusting as I discovered things, only to throw it all away to try to make a better job with the next draft.

My feeling is, if that's all that's going into your draft, then why not solve it in the outline? You'd have a better grasp with a good outline and it would take less time. I don't think a whole text is a good way to capture all the ideas of a book so you can then look at them analytically and try to shuffle them into a better form.

But maybe that's just me. I'm of the clean-draft philosophy. Of course, it might just mean I'm creating a draft with tighter weaves that is harder to pick apart and re-structure.