an inconvenient truth about my process

[truepenny]

80,053 words. 29,947 to go.

Sometimes, when I don't know how a scene goes or what it's doing, and I keep writing, I end up getting stuck because the words wander into a dead-end, or onto a path that the book doesn't want to follow. That happened to me last week, and it took me several days to regroup.

Sometimes, when I don't know how a scene goes or what it's doing, and I keep writing, after some blundering through the underbrush, I come out onto the path, and it's the right path, the place where the book wants to go. That happened to me tonight.

Trouble is, you can never tell which one it's going to be until afterwards.

Comments

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

That's been happening to me a lot with short stories lately. Except I never find the path again and they die. I know it's just a part of the process, I've trained my brain to do it much more right and it needs to diffuse out into my blood... But damn. It'd be easy to take up drinking as profession.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Oh god, yes. Sometimes the best stuff comes out of blundering through the underbrush -- but sometimes you end up with the 40K kill-file I've got from Star. The amount of work I could have saved, if I'd just known how to spot the dead-ends before I got stuck in them . . . .

[nathreee.livejournal.com]

yep, that's just how it works for me too.