Regrets I’ve Had A Few
Okay, so, you’re going to write, and you’re going to write fast.
First, have a plan. It can be as detailed (or not) as you wish, and different books have hit me different ways. Some come at me as outlines (though this is rare) and some are complete pantsying where I don’t know what happens next.
Darkship Renegades was an outlined book – actually outlined four times, each time refined. A Few Good Men poured out in a rush, with NO outline. In fact, I never knew from line to line – let alone from chapter to chapter – what happened next. I don’t know what betas who read both manuscripts think, but my impression, at least from the editorial letters, is that the editor would guess the process backwards.
Anyway, in either case – and it’s very important to point out that the decision is up to you and that HOW you write can’t be told by the product – when you sit down you should have a general idea of what you’re going to do. If you’re a pantser, you should have the feel and “voice” in your head. If you’re not, you should have chapters outlined. It’s ENTIRELY up to you. However, do try to minimize time of sitting in front of the blank screen. This too can become an habit. If you don’t think you’ll be able to work on your novel in progress, try for a short or something. Try for a warm up short. Or something. Anything. Write an essay about what you had for breakfast. (Actually I have this thing I call “boring yourself into writing” where I write something like… what I had for breakfast, and my brain prefers to let me write rather than endure one more like of it.)
Now, most of us write to music, though I know writers who write to TV and those who need total silence. Make sure you have your conditions.
Then start writing and – this is very, very important – don’t stop.
Yes, you might think you made a huge mistake five pages up. Forget it, just write on.
But what if you REALLY made a huge mistake?
There are two types of “huge mistakes” and two ways to deal with them.
If your mistake is in wording, forget it. I’ve often said words are the things I don’t sweat, but having read these (almost unedited) posts, I’m sure you see that I’m often VERY far from perfect. In fact, in reading my stories over the first time, I’m often totally puzzled by “what the heck did I mean by this sentence” or “Why did I put this thought down entirely backwards?” It doesn’t matter. No matter how tortured your prose is first pass, there will ALWAYS be others. And it’s not only faster to move on and continue, it’s often best. While you’re still in the fog of the story, even if the words are TRULY wrong, it’s almost impossible to know what the right word was, back there, three paragraphs up. Worse, it throws you out of the current paragraph.
Train yourself to keep moving forward and consign revisions to the revision process.
But what if your huge mistake was plot? What if you just realized you killed a character you’ll need for the next scene? Or that your main characters shouldn’t have slept together just yet?
Well… Keep MOVING forward. Adjust your assumptions as you go. Yes, this often means that you get to the end and you have not a novel, but five or six segments of novel. However, this is preferable to interrupting and going back up to fix it.
Reasons why it’s better –
If this is happening to you, I assume you’re at least a PARTIAL pantser, in which case your writing comes from deep in the subconscious. This means you might not actually know, while in the middle, what your subconscious is up to, or where it REALLY is going. So, here are reasons it’s better to wait to the end to smooth the plot so “it’s all one” and remember all of these are taken from my own experience.
1 – It’s faster, and it might save your novel. If you go back and adjust this now, it might very well take another turn on you, in the next page. This might mean you never finish your novel. OR that you finish it, but it’s total soup, because every other page you have a different turn.
2 – The plot might not be what you think it is. What you think is a wrong turn might be the only way the novel will be written. I’ve had characters shock me by dying, and have tried to fight it, only to realize when the novel is done, that it’s needed. It’s easier to smooth the rest of the novel afterwards, so they’re still dead (actually it feels so wrong to write them after that, that I usually can’t do it. I could by going back and rewriting, but in retrospect that would SERIOUSLY cheapen the novel) than have to re-kill them and rewrite the whole thing.
3 – Even if it’s really a wrong turn, you’ll often find it can be “smoothed” by deleting a few pages. Your subconscious knew where the novel REALLY should go and all the other pointers, before and after “wrong scene” are right. This is faster, but it also avoids you going back and writing in pointers, only to end up hitting the reader over the head, when the product is done.
4 – You really have a clearer vision of beginning/middle/end while editing, and you’ll be much more consistent, if you do each of the passes – writing/editing/plot editing/proofing – in one seamless work-push. That way you avoid stylistic jumps and losing touch with what your reader is thinking.
Then there is editing when you’re writing fast, but that’s a topic for tomorrow.
According To Hoyt 
What the “heck” do you do when you’re “writing quickly” and you can’t think of the spelling of a word?
There have been times where I *know* the word I want but can’t think of the spelling for the life of me.
No, sounding it out doesn’t work for me and spell-chucker actually makes the problem worse.
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LOL. Happens to me a lot. Just put an unusual character at the beginning, so the spillchucker will kick it up in spell checking.
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An option that does not really works in talking. ;)
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In those cases — assuming you mean conversation and not dictating to the computer — I usually resort to something like: “WORD! Thingy! Noun!”
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LOL. Beth, my best friend married a Frenchman when I got married. Our common language is, of course, Portuguese, but it’s been twenty six for me and twenty seven for her in different countries, speaking another language. When we talk on the phone half of our conversation is “Uh… that thing, you know” “Oh, yeah, I know what you mean. I also don’t knwo the word.”
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No can do.
Lockups happen usually when I want to use a (very) specific word, meaning or translation and can’t find it. So I have to remember to to force myself to paraphrase – or simply to use another, more generic word.
Not that the translation necessarily has to exist in the way I suspect at that moment. Say bone. Rather simple right? Now I did did not want to talk about bones like in my arm or a cow but rather about fish. Yeah, fish bone (or just bone), sooo simple… (Two totally different for words in German.)
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I used to translate scientific papers from German, back when I had an honest job. (No, don’t try it. It’s gone the way of the dodo. Given say a couple of months and reading a lot in German, I’d get it back [probably. There’s a major concussion in the way. Who knows what it did].) One afternoon I spent an ENTIRE afternoon looking for the translation of ONE word in a German document, upon which an entire sentence hung. This was before the internet, so I had to go physically looking for all the German dictionaries the company owned, distributed over about five libraries. I finally found it. It was the word for the inner curvature of the eye. (Sob.) And that’s the day I decided to become a writer. (Not really, but it makes a good story.)
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/// rethink killing so-and-so last chapter???
And go on writing. Yeah, got it.
I know _exactly_ the right word exists, but I can’t think of it right now . . . yeah, that one stops me dead. Usually a snack/meal/bathroom break will snap the brain freeze and I’ll remember the word, and wonder why I was so fussed about it . . .
Most of my notes-to-self involve going back and filling in character details. ///Find an early spot to mention MC is mixed race.
Or correct gender if name is ambiguous, or has purple hair. They are bits of Editor Brain sliding in, and getting in a note before they are banished. So long as they aren’t allowed to take over, they aren’t all bad.
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I porcupine my desk (used to be my monitor, but with flat monitor and recessed, that’s hard to do.) with sticky notes. If I’m not sure of a plot turn, I scribble “reevaluate reason for fight chapter three. NEEDS stronger” — this was actually a note for the last novel — slap it on the top of my roll top, and go on with life.
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One way of dealing with the sorts of problems addressed in this post is to plan on them occurring and making preparations for addressing them in the most expeditious manner. Sticky notes are one method, but it might serve to keep a legal pad handy and jot down notes to refer to when editing. These notes can address such trivia as plot turns, word selection (keep a thesaurus available and throw/toss/plant/insert several synonyms into the manuscript — that will help you back into the process of finding the word you wanted) and character quirks (chap. 2, scene 3, Amanda Hugginkiss displays round heels when she should be in stilletos: WTF?) Such notes can help by a) reminding you where you thought snags occurred without slowing the writing process and b) cluing you in to what you thought the problems were; as noted, maybe it was necessary for Amanda to don knee pads and the reason came out 5 chapters along.
What does puzzle me about this entry in the ongoing series is the misleading title. There appears to be nothing here about writing intravenously.
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Ah. Well! I forgot to put it in, see. It’s very simple. First you take a page from every fast and good writer who ever lived, you mash it up, strain a solution of glucose in water through it, then mainline the solution. THEN you can do what I suggested. (If you’re diabetic, use distilled water, of course.)
And lest one of you is zonky enough from writing to try this advice, I’m JUST picking on RES.
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Hunh – I always read that the BESTest writers – Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Chandler, etc. – use a 90 proof alcohol base.
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One of the things that slows me down is that I’ll have some word in mind that is precisely the mot juste for the situation in the next sentence, but while I’m getting the preceding material entered it just.goes.away — I can’t think of it, or of any synonyms, or of any way to look it up; the whole concept and all its relatives are just a dark-matter void. It might be a name, it might be a noun or an adjective or any other part of speech, but when I get to that point it will.not.emerge from my mental processes, and for me that’s a brick wall. For some reason I cannot put in a placeholder and continue; what I have to do is just stop writing and do something else until my brain consents to allow the concept to become available once more. It doesn’t help that some of those occasions result in red-curtain-of-blood-level rage at myself and my undependable brain…
Regards,
Ric
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My problem with words is those words which exist in Finnish but not in English. One example is that Finnish has a lot more words for different types of snow that English does. So I’m writing something that happens in winter, things go smoothly until the characters do something outside and, well, I get this one word which would describe the scenery perfectly except it is a Finnish word, there is no equivalent in English and then I have to use a full sentence to describe what I could say in one word in my native tongue.
And it does go the other way around too. I also write in Finnish, and sometimes get stuck with something that would be much easier to write using English.
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However, if it is like Swedish at all, it has fewer words for relationships-by-blood. Sort of like old-English.
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