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Some thoughts:
I should say that I think "making it up as you go along" is a perfectly acceptable tactic for a short story or poem, because the finished thing is short and manageable and you can go back and change it easily if and when you need to.
If you've got something the length of a novel though, a wrong turn you took on a whim is going to cost more than just the price of re-writing a paragraph (the image that springs to mind is Gromit laying down those railway tracks in The Wrong Trousers, and the fact that while he is an amazing dog and could predict exactly which track to put down, you and I do not have that kind of foresight in the thick of it and will probably end up crashing into the table and not catching the penguin*).
You may very well end up with entire chapters or chunks of chapters that need getting rid of or re-writing from scratch, and this arduous repetition will shit all over your creativity. This can be largely avoided with some planning.
If you look at, say, On the Road, that was a very spontaneous novel but crucially it was recording real events and so the author's mimesis of those real events would seem to have come naturally in their writing down. If you're writing something that's purely, or largely, fictional- it'll need a lot more work. This is something I've been trying to get across to certain Kerouac fanboys of late.
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One of the things the snowflake man made clear and which I will stress again is that the original idea, the original plan, can change as much as it needs to during the planning stages- what we're doing is focussing the creative urge, not restricting it- the idea is to marshal your ideas properly in the planning stage first and then go all semantic splurge when it comes to the writing and you know which direction to take it in.
One of the arguments for the "make it up as you go along" approach is that characters will dictate what needs to happen, and so you can't know in advance. Sure they will- yet as above you can make all these changes in the planning stages.
It's a hell of a lot easier to play with the book's skeleton than it is to rewrite a full draft over and over. In fact, let's be honest, you will shelve the project in the latter case.
I also think from bitter personal experience that making it up as you go along is a breeding ground for all manner of awful sub-Beat streams of conciousness or rambling point-free genre epics: there's far too much room to be lazy and sloppy, to please yourself rather than think about communicating a dialogue with your reader, with A.N. Other Human Being who it is your job to entertain (unless your idea of writing is purely self-gratifying- in which case fine, but don't expect to see it published).
If you can rigorously self-edit and rigorously self-discipline then maybe, just maybe, you can do the whole thing spontaneously** from top to bottom, but then I think you would also be a Dalek.
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All this is not to say that you should go in the opposite direction and write the sodding Silmarillion. When I hear people talking about making geographical maps with trees and houses or drawing spaceship schematics or writing long, complete character biographies I cringe- I don't think you need to do this stuff and I also think people do it as an excuse to do anything other than The Writing Itself. It's cuddly, fluffy stuff, and means exactly nothing to your reader.
It's another shitter on creativity- if you want to write down a pertinent fact that must be remembered, like say, "Bob has blue eyes", "the cat is brown", "there is a post office next to the shop", then fine, but don't for heaven's sake waste your energy on numbly cataloguing all data.
To sum up, don't get hung up on the bones, but do sort out a skeleton first, otherwise you'll end up with a sluggy turd.
*I apologise profusely
**This isn't to knock spontaneity in general, in fact I find cut-ups are a great way of generating that first, primal idea or ideas |
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