Saturday, January 19, 2019

He sat upon a river-rock and turned into a toad

My morning writing session is stalling out on too much thinking.

That's the thing that Nanowrimo is supposed to address. The thing that a really complete outline could possibly provide. That is; the ability to put words on paper as fast as you can type them.

On the other hand, as was pointed out in a recent episode of the excellent Writing Excuses podcast, sometimes slowing down is a signal from the less conscious parts of your writing brain that something isn't right and you need to go back.

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I still believe that a whole text is more than a sum of parts. I had a whole metaphor about tapestry weaving in my mind to illustrate this but when I stopped for a little research the metaphor doesn't really work.

Think of collage, or those things you do with kids when you cut shapes out of felt and stick them up on another piece of felt. That's when writing can be really fast; they are just shapes, complete in and of themselves, and you can stick them anywhere.

I'd think about calling this embroidery but while embroidery has the same advantage of a fixed surface to which patterns of arbitrary shape can be attached in arbitrary order, there's something about embroidery and all the special stitches and the looping patterns of application that just seems to bend the metaphor too much.

Tapestry is not really embroidery (unless it is the Bayeux), but the lack of continuous weft threads doesn't really help make it distinct as a metaphor. Really, weaving comes closer to what most writing is really like. You have multiple ideas which are visible in spots and invisible in others but are contiguous and parallel nonetheless. So you have to track all these elements whether they are in a particular block of text or not, and they have to be planned for all the way at the start even if you don't intend to introduce them until later.

And that I feel is how the majority works. The warp and weft are both part of the fabric of the story, not a neutral base as is true for embroidery, and you can't pull one thread without causing changes to ripple everywhere.

And I suppose writing can sometimes end up crossing threads in crazy patterns but I'm not crazy about using macrame as a metaphor so never mind.

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So, yeah. Writers who are trying to just get a block of text on the page so they can start examining it to see how it works and whittling away at it where it doesn't talk about the "internal censor" or the "internal editor" for all those ways you stall in the middle of typing and get lost trying to think about the grammar or the spelling or whether this is really where you intended the scene to go.

Me, I call this the "inner researcher." Because it is really hard not to let the urge to look something up stop me in the middle of putting a line of words down. Because what should matter for first draft is the flow of the scene. You've got a moment where the safety clicks on a gun. You don't want to stop to look up whether that gun would have a safety at all. Or dive into the research materials trying to decide upon what's the perfect firearm for that time and place and that fits that character. Or start worrying about whether the click would even be audible in the test chamber and start reading up on the dB ratings of exhaust fans.

Because when you finish that draft and come around for a second pass you may find a knife is more dramatic for the scene or that nobody ends up being threatening at all or the entire scene doesn't work and needs to be cut.

Draft is draft. It's just a lengthier outline. Or so the people who slam down 1,667 words in every twenty four hours say....until they have to go back at the tangled mess they've created and try to figure out where the threads actually go....

As in all things, moderation. Sometimes you do have to and should stop and figure something out. The sketchiest draft is still a problem-solving exercise, and you can't solve every problem on the run. The trick, the real trick, is knowing when.

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