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Thinking aloud here. Pay no attention. It will be quite dull.
A fact about my writing process has become more obvious to me as I go through this month with my NaNoWriMo project. It's always been easy for me to see that when I write non-fiction (such as my blog posts or editorial comments for M-Brane) that it can generally be made a lot tighter and more coherent by a quick edit. This nearly always results in fewer words. (This is not to say that I generally spend the time to actually do a lot of that of sort of editing on blog posts--I'm just making an observation).
With fiction, however, I find that when I slip into a mode of writing rather quickly, just to get the story spilled out, as I am trying to do for NaNoWriMo, then I end up with a rather skeletal beast. Indeed, the editing process with fiction is for me almost always one of adding a lot more words. By the time I was done revising my story for TWAN, it had inflated by over 1000 words from its original condition (total word count when done: 4700). I will look over a passage or a scene and say to myself, "This has no substance, no atmosphere, no detail," and then start laying in that stuff. Which almost always adds words. So here's my dilemma today: as I approach the 30,000 word mark, I am starting to feel that it's possible that I if I were to sort all my scenes into proper order from start to finish, I would have already have something resembling the complete story, just lacking for some of that back-filling of substance and detail.
I can't decide if I should stop cranking out words for a couple hours, sort this thing out, read it over, find out what's missing and start the editing process. Another problem is that I get lost in my manuscripts when I try long-form fiction because I don't have an outline. I sort of "see" the whole sweep of the story, but not it's step-by-step progression. I tend to just write scenes as they come to me without regard for where they will go in the finished story. When one document full of scenes gets too long and unwieldy, I start another one and then merge them later. My still unfinished sf novel Shame is in this condition: various documents have been merged, it's fairly well sorted out, but is still riddled with holes, needing some new scenes that link others together logically. Instead of getting those missing pieces drafted, however, I spend my time with it tweaking and revising the existing portions.
OK, it's too early in NaNo to risk getting bogged down in revision when I still need a lot more raw word count. I will sort out my manuscript, but not do any editing, and then get right back into the raw writing.
A fact about my writing process has become more obvious to me as I go through this month with my NaNoWriMo project. It's always been easy for me to see that when I write non-fiction (such as my blog posts or editorial comments for M-Brane) that it can generally be made a lot tighter and more coherent by a quick edit. This nearly always results in fewer words. (This is not to say that I generally spend the time to actually do a lot of that of sort of editing on blog posts--I'm just making an observation).
With fiction, however, I find that when I slip into a mode of writing rather quickly, just to get the story spilled out, as I am trying to do for NaNoWriMo, then I end up with a rather skeletal beast. Indeed, the editing process with fiction is for me almost always one of adding a lot more words. By the time I was done revising my story for TWAN, it had inflated by over 1000 words from its original condition (total word count when done: 4700). I will look over a passage or a scene and say to myself, "This has no substance, no atmosphere, no detail," and then start laying in that stuff. Which almost always adds words. So here's my dilemma today: as I approach the 30,000 word mark, I am starting to feel that it's possible that I if I were to sort all my scenes into proper order from start to finish, I would have already have something resembling the complete story, just lacking for some of that back-filling of substance and detail.
I can't decide if I should stop cranking out words for a couple hours, sort this thing out, read it over, find out what's missing and start the editing process. Another problem is that I get lost in my manuscripts when I try long-form fiction because I don't have an outline. I sort of "see" the whole sweep of the story, but not it's step-by-step progression. I tend to just write scenes as they come to me without regard for where they will go in the finished story. When one document full of scenes gets too long and unwieldy, I start another one and then merge them later. My still unfinished sf novel Shame is in this condition: various documents have been merged, it's fairly well sorted out, but is still riddled with holes, needing some new scenes that link others together logically. Instead of getting those missing pieces drafted, however, I spend my time with it tweaking and revising the existing portions.
OK, it's too early in NaNo to risk getting bogged down in revision when I still need a lot more raw word count. I will sort out my manuscript, but not do any editing, and then get right back into the raw writing.
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Date: 2009-11-18 03:26 am (UTC)Not doing NaNo this year; need to research the next novel (I am nattering around with a free flow story that has hit around 20k; I seem to have three of these lying around). Meanwhile, the short stories seem to be simmering. But it took NaNo to get the writer's block flushed out and the internal editor jailed long enough for me to figure out how to get something written without getting reactive and assuming it was crap.