A peril of pantsing
This being the misnamed (Inter)National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, I thought I'd mention something that has occurred to me as a peril of pantsing.
Pantsing, as you might or might not know, is diving into the story without an outline or sometimes even preconceptions. A seat-of-the-pants writer.
(Before we go further: I am a pantser: I am impatient, and I often dive in and start writing dialogue or setting or action or something when I should be figuring out what exactly should be going on. Which means that I have run into many of the issues with pantsing--the perils and promises of pantsing, if you want to keep up the alliteration.)
There are a number of benefits to pantsing, by the way: the story tends to be organic; it often doesn't feel formulaic in the way that one constructed to a recipe does; and it is usually interesting to the writer if not the reader.
It can also be terribly cliche because the author has never bothered to look deeper into anything. It can be hard to revise because the gold and dross are so intertwined that you can't separate them. It can suffer from tremendous story holes that either never occurred to the author or got papered over in hopes of getting to the fun stuff (whatever the author thinks is the fun stuff).
And for me, the biggest problem is that it grows organically. Like a bird nest, I'm packing in whatever I find at the moment (usually it's relevant stuff but heck) and building on whatever has gone before.
Even the crap stuff that has gone before.
Good stuff built on crap tends to fall down. (There's some kind of saying involving houses built on sand.)
This also tends to make revision really difficult.
The only thing I've found that reliably works is a comprehensive scene-by-scene breakdown of the existing text. For each scene, you want to know who's involved, what they want, where in time and space the scene is set, and how things are different when the scene ends. For SF or fantasy, you also want to know what details get used or introduced, and what dependencies there are on those details.
Example: You're doing a superhero novel and you had the vague idea that all super powers are essentially magic. You started with "an odd crime." The burglar alarm didn't work. Why not? Because, uh, all burglar alarms are broken. Eventually, you build on that and decide that technology is "tamed magic." The bad guy needs huge amounts of magic to immanentize the eschaton or something, so he's gradually freeing the magic: certain devices stop working, and the heroes have to catch him before he unbinds the magic that makes everyday things work. One thing builds on another. The idea that everything is going to stop is based on the idea that technology is magic.
Are there interesting ideas there? Sure. But if you want to get rid of one of the middle ideas, you have to know how it's going to affect the later ideas.
Revision also tends to be really really difficult. I have to go through the text and figure out things about the scene: What's the purpose? Do things change during or afterward? What are the relative statuses of the characters? Who wants what? What plot information gets revealed? What are the dependencies forward and backward?
Symptomatic: Years ago I did a roleplaying campaign built around a crash-landing on an Alderson disk, tossing in neat ideas as I encountered them. At some point, I tossed in a plague as a background detail for the PC characters. And eventually I realized that I had set them loose on a huge structure where no one had the immunity to the plague that the PCs did. I realized that everyone who had come in contact with the PCs were probably going to die, and I couldn't figure out a way to avoid this in the structure I had already created. The campaign ended. I still remember this-though not the details-thirty years later.
(This inability to skip a troublesome detail in the hopes that we'll fix it later or maybe they won't notice is mine. I own it.)
Once I know what the purpose of a given detail is (is it going to be important later? Or is it just there to show how kooky the world is?) I can try and figure out how I should replace it.
There is also the lighter problem of no ideas. You might get yourself into a situation where you don't actually see a response. I call that "lighter" because, even though work on the manuscript stops, you might actually go back to it.
So: I actually recommend outlining, even if it's as big as "tell the broad parts of the story." You don't have to get into details unless they have you stumped, but it helps to have a direction you're aiming at. (Happy ending! Sad ending! Mixed! Some kind of personal loss!) "We discover the ring is bad. Perils on the way to the meeting place. Hurried departure to show how badass the villains are." And so on.
Posted on DreamWidth at http://doc-lemming.dreamwidth.org/203611.html. Try this link to reply over there.
Pantsing, as you might or might not know, is diving into the story without an outline or sometimes even preconceptions. A seat-of-the-pants writer.
(Before we go further: I am a pantser: I am impatient, and I often dive in and start writing dialogue or setting or action or something when I should be figuring out what exactly should be going on. Which means that I have run into many of the issues with pantsing--the perils and promises of pantsing, if you want to keep up the alliteration.)
There are a number of benefits to pantsing, by the way: the story tends to be organic; it often doesn't feel formulaic in the way that one constructed to a recipe does; and it is usually interesting to the writer if not the reader.
It can also be terribly cliche because the author has never bothered to look deeper into anything. It can be hard to revise because the gold and dross are so intertwined that you can't separate them. It can suffer from tremendous story holes that either never occurred to the author or got papered over in hopes of getting to the fun stuff (whatever the author thinks is the fun stuff).
And for me, the biggest problem is that it grows organically. Like a bird nest, I'm packing in whatever I find at the moment (usually it's relevant stuff but heck) and building on whatever has gone before.
Even the crap stuff that has gone before.
Good stuff built on crap tends to fall down. (There's some kind of saying involving houses built on sand.)
This also tends to make revision really difficult.
The only thing I've found that reliably works is a comprehensive scene-by-scene breakdown of the existing text. For each scene, you want to know who's involved, what they want, where in time and space the scene is set, and how things are different when the scene ends. For SF or fantasy, you also want to know what details get used or introduced, and what dependencies there are on those details.
Example: You're doing a superhero novel and you had the vague idea that all super powers are essentially magic. You started with "an odd crime." The burglar alarm didn't work. Why not? Because, uh, all burglar alarms are broken. Eventually, you build on that and decide that technology is "tamed magic." The bad guy needs huge amounts of magic to immanentize the eschaton or something, so he's gradually freeing the magic: certain devices stop working, and the heroes have to catch him before he unbinds the magic that makes everyday things work. One thing builds on another. The idea that everything is going to stop is based on the idea that technology is magic.
Are there interesting ideas there? Sure. But if you want to get rid of one of the middle ideas, you have to know how it's going to affect the later ideas.
Revision also tends to be really really difficult. I have to go through the text and figure out things about the scene: What's the purpose? Do things change during or afterward? What are the relative statuses of the characters? Who wants what? What plot information gets revealed? What are the dependencies forward and backward?
Symptomatic: Years ago I did a roleplaying campaign built around a crash-landing on an Alderson disk, tossing in neat ideas as I encountered them. At some point, I tossed in a plague as a background detail for the PC characters. And eventually I realized that I had set them loose on a huge structure where no one had the immunity to the plague that the PCs did. I realized that everyone who had come in contact with the PCs were probably going to die, and I couldn't figure out a way to avoid this in the structure I had already created. The campaign ended. I still remember this-though not the details-thirty years later.
(This inability to skip a troublesome detail in the hopes that we'll fix it later or maybe they won't notice is mine. I own it.)
Once I know what the purpose of a given detail is (is it going to be important later? Or is it just there to show how kooky the world is?) I can try and figure out how I should replace it.
There is also the lighter problem of no ideas. You might get yourself into a situation where you don't actually see a response. I call that "lighter" because, even though work on the manuscript stops, you might actually go back to it.
So: I actually recommend outlining, even if it's as big as "tell the broad parts of the story." You don't have to get into details unless they have you stumped, but it helps to have a direction you're aiming at. (Happy ending! Sad ending! Mixed! Some kind of personal loss!) "We discover the ring is bad. Perils on the way to the meeting place. Hurried departure to show how badass the villains are." And so on.
Posted on DreamWidth at http://doc-lemming.dreamwidth.org/203611.html. Try this link to reply over there.