posted
Since you've been posting here lately, I can't resist asking a few writing questions directly, in case you feel like answering any of them:
1. In the Writing Class lesson on "Beginnings," you say you keep working on a story's beginning until you get it right. But after that, do you ever jump around and write scenes or chapters out of order?
2. When you're writing toward a deadline, do you use any progress goals or habits to keep you going? (Such as pages or hours per day.)
3. Do you write all of your novels only after you've sold them to a publisher, or do you write any on spec?
4. How detailed is your outline/synopsis before you write a novel? Do you break the story down by each scene or chapter, or do you summarize the whole story without knowing those divisions?
Thanks! I hope Brigadoon goes well. May all involved break the proverbial leg.
Posts: 6 | Registered: May 2005
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posted
I can't help wondering if OSC saw these questions and chose not to answer them, which is of course fine and I hope I'm not being rude now.
Or else did they fall off the recent page too fast for him to see? Especially since I cleverly posted right before Brigadoon.
I was reminded because last night I finished Shadow of the Giant, and I just recommended the Shadow books to a friend who, like me, is an OSC fan and aspiring writer. She said, "I should at least read the first book. I mean, I did already read four different beginnings to it."
It took me a good minute to realize she meant that Writing Class lesson on "Beginnings."
Posts: 6 | Registered: May 2005
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I never write out of order. Anything that happens in one chapter will affect all subsequent chapters. If it DOESN'T affect later chapters, then why bother to include it? So if I wrote chapter 18 without writing chapter 15 first, then when I do write 15 - and 16, and 17 - they will introduce so many changes in the storyline that my earlier draft of 18 will be useless. So chapters written out of order are useless to me.
Much to my publishers' horror, I don't write to deadline. I write to get it right. And whenever there's some kind of progress goal, I find myself unable to work at all until the goal goes away. Not a scheduling kind of guy, I guess.
Right now I have so many things under contract that to write on spec would be irresponsible.
My outlines are very detailed. But once I start writing, I come up with so much MORE cool stuff tha the outlines have to be drastically altered or partly ignored. I never let an outline limit me - it's a suggested path, not a rigid set of walls.
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
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