I've found it to be really freeing for me, but I'm also a packrat. I think I'm going to need those words. Every single one of them. What if I'm five pages down the road, and suddenly I want to use something I deleted? (These are my thought processes, not necessarily the sanest or most logical, but ya know.) It sort of... gives me permission to just keep trucking on, because I'm not deleting anything.
I'll have to show you those bits at some point, just because they're so darn odd.
Re: Structure
Okay... I might have been lying a little, because at some point, I do usually realize where I'm going with something. That something doesn't always necessarily resemble it, but in my head that "somewhere" is what I've been calling the climax. Architecturally speaking, it's the "support beam", without it the story is never going to hold much weight.
Out of interest, do you literally 'see' the story as a movie. I ask because that's how it felt to me in 'See No Evil' - it's how I write, and I suspect it's common to writers who like to write action scenes. That you block it out in your head and write it down? Those scenes really *worked* for me, so I just wondered.
I do! And I mean, I literally see it as a movie in my head. With cuts, close-ups, rising swell of music, dramatic pauses, the whole shebang. A lot of the time, I'll generally "block" it out in my head, I know who's standing where, where they move, what happens after that (generally). If there's dialogue, I kind of have an idea of what it's about, sometimes it's fun and snappy and fully formed, other times it's marked as [ACTORS IMPROV] in my head. I usually do this either late at night when I'm falling asleep, while I'm in traffic, or doing some mundane task with my brain turned off and my music turned on.
When the actual prose starts to accompany the action and the movie, that's when I know I'm in trouble.
Is your goal usually a character one or a plot one?
Except on the very rare occasion, it's almost always both. While the plot and characters are separate things in my mind, they both move along at their own pace and are distinct entities, they influence each other constantly, to where they're almost like a piece of string, several threads twined together to make one stronger narrative. (If that analogy fits.)
Sometimes one will overshadow the other in its importance for that climax/something/it moment. The plot, the actual action and motion of the story in "See No Evil" wound up providing the story-wise climax (I still haven't figured out if it was the motorcycle chase or the final fight with Marrick), but both John and Rodney wound up having distinct, emotional arcs that came to a head right around the same time. John's in general had to do with finding his purpose again, in this case in protecting Rodney. Rodney's was in choosing his friend, definitively, over his assignment/getting his life back.
"Wit's End" was all about getting Rodney to his breaking point, so every single thing in that story was working toward that moment, and how he would come back. So there was plot in that story, but it was the character arc that drove it rather than the story's mechanics.
Out of curiosity, what's the issue you're having with the Criminal Minds WIP?
no subject
I've found it to be really freeing for me, but I'm also a packrat. I think I'm going to need those words. Every single one of them. What if I'm five pages down the road, and suddenly I want to use something I deleted? (These are my thought processes, not necessarily the sanest or most logical, but ya know.) It sort of... gives me permission to just keep trucking on, because I'm not deleting anything.
I'll have to show you those bits at some point, just because they're so darn odd.
Re: Structure
Okay... I might have been lying a little, because at some point, I do usually realize where I'm going with something. That something doesn't always necessarily resemble it, but in my head that "somewhere" is what I've been calling the climax. Architecturally speaking, it's the "support beam", without it the story is never going to hold much weight.
Out of interest, do you literally 'see' the story as a movie. I ask because that's how it felt to me in 'See No Evil' - it's how I write, and I suspect it's common to writers who like to write action scenes. That you block it out in your head and write it down? Those scenes really *worked* for me, so I just wondered.
I do! And I mean, I literally see it as a movie in my head. With cuts, close-ups, rising swell of music, dramatic pauses, the whole shebang. A lot of the time, I'll generally "block" it out in my head, I know who's standing where, where they move, what happens after that (generally). If there's dialogue, I kind of have an idea of what it's about, sometimes it's fun and snappy and fully formed, other times it's marked as [ACTORS IMPROV] in my head. I usually do this either late at night when I'm falling asleep, while I'm in traffic, or doing some mundane task with my brain turned off and my music turned on.
When the actual prose starts to accompany the action and the movie, that's when I know I'm in trouble.
Is your goal usually a character one or a plot one?
Except on the very rare occasion, it's almost always both. While the plot and characters are separate things in my mind, they both move along at their own pace and are distinct entities, they influence each other constantly, to where they're almost like a piece of string, several threads twined together to make one stronger narrative. (If that analogy fits.)
Sometimes one will overshadow the other in its importance for that climax/something/it moment. The plot, the actual action and motion of the story in "See No Evil" wound up providing the story-wise climax (I still haven't figured out if it was the motorcycle chase or the final fight with Marrick), but both John and Rodney wound up having distinct, emotional arcs that came to a head right around the same time. John's in general had to do with finding his purpose again, in this case in protecting Rodney. Rodney's was in choosing his friend, definitively, over his assignment/getting his life back.
"Wit's End" was all about getting Rodney to his breaking point, so every single thing in that story was working toward that moment, and how he would come back. So there was plot in that story, but it was the character arc that drove it rather than the story's mechanics.
Out of curiosity, what's the issue you're having with the Criminal Minds WIP?