One thing I've noticed that drives me crazy about my own writing process is the unbelievably silly propensity to plan everything out in my head. Granted, that can be a good thing. Getting a sense for how a scene could unfold, brainstorming, etc. But that is all it is: a sense. I have to remind myself of this several times a week!
Something that has helped me get passed the difficult translation of images to words is to remember that the brainstorm - all those images of characters interacting in the depths of your imagination - is only the beginning. Words will eventually tell the story, so... why not start with words... and from words form the images?
This makes sense to me. But for those of you I have confused with my ridiculousness, think of it this way: weaving a picture with words and leaving the ultimate mystery of what you are actually creating to the moment you sit down with pen or keyboard and begin. A story is carried in the womb of our imagination, but it must be birthed... that doesn't mean it has to look good or whole when it first emerges in front of you.
After all, writing - no matter what it is intended to be - is a journey of patience and self-discovery, not a product of x number of pages fitting exactly into a pre-planned formula. Organic, real.
Yeah, definitely. It's not real until you put it into words, and the act of putting it into words changes it into something new. It's all very well, for example, to have an idea of "a lot of time will pass" but you have to figure out how you're going to narrate it. And once you've put words in -- ANY words, even if they just seem like filler -- you've changed it, you've defined it in a way it wasn't before.
ReplyDeleteI've heard some writers say that their characters--the rounded, well-realized ones--force them to abandon their plans because the characters would dictate the direction of their stories, sometimes in unexpected ways. I'm not a writer but if I DID attempt to write something, I'd try to imagine an ending and then figure out how to get there . . .
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