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I was talking to a friend recently, whose novels are both irritatingly good and culpably well-received, and he admitted that he starts with an idea and gets to work. He doesn't plan at all. The consequences of this are legion - his characters take him places he did not expect to go, and events play off one another in a realistic way. He can find himself written into a corner and have to start over (he does this about fifteen times per novel - I'm not talking about reworkings here, I'm talking about back to page one, new characters, new everything, same general notion).
That way of doing things fills me with a mixture of terror and admiration - partly because my industry is so fixated on knowing what you get before you pay for it that I haven't done any work for years which wasn't plotted in advance, at least for my own satisfaction.
I make notes and I draw diagrams and I write little bits and I do themes and wild ideas and digressions and...
Good luck. You'll find your own way through it. Ten random bits of advice given to me over the years:
1) You're using too many adjectives.
2) Message is for hacks - if you write the story, the message will be there.
3) "The cat sat on the mat" is a piece of trivia. "The cat sat on the dog's mat" is the beginning of a story.
4) You're still using too many adjectives.
5) You know that first page you wrote which set everything out, introduced the character, set the tone? Delete it. That's what the rest of the novel is for.
6) Don't tell me about stuff. Tell me stuff. Let me do the judging.
7) See that? That's an adjective you don't need. They're like roaches - let one in and you'll see more.
8) Don't sit down in fron of a blank page without a clue what you're going to say, and always leave yourself something easy to do when you stop at night, so that you have a gentle run in in the morning.
9) Not every page has to sing opera. You are allowed to rest for several beats.
10) Discipline. |
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