Stuck On A Scene
Sunday, November 13th, 2005 @ 14:11
It’s a weird and unpleasant feeling, especially when it’s a scene that is planned, and not an idea that has struck all of a sudden and “looks like a good one”. It makes writing become sluggish and a chore, yet I know I can’t just give up or switch to something else in a snap of fingers, else I may very well remain stuck for much, much longer.
I have such a scene in my current work in progress. It’s an important enough one, where one of the main characters reveals what she knows to the two others. It’s a planned scene, that actually looked great in my outline, when I noted town its main points and what was going to be revealed. However, it feels like a bore to write now, mostly, I suspect, because I’m not sure by which end to take it.
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This thought hit me yesterday, while watching an episode of Monk, and this is probably why I’m going to link this to mystery novels and other kinds of “investigation” stories. How noticeable is a detail for an untrained person? To which extent can we consider that our characters are able to notice certain types of details more than other types? Of course, there’s a difference to be made here between knowledge learnt from books/school, knowledge learnt from experience/training/practice, and knowledge that one can happen to have because they stumbled upon it at some point in their lives, without their career and social/familial situation explaining it. The latter is always the one that is the trickiest for me: what is acceptable, and what is just a deus ex machina mechanism chosen by the author as a convenient solution?
It’s only today that I’ve discovered this site, which is still in it beta version, but looks pretty interesting all the same: 
I probably mentioned this in passing a few times here: shall I go on with writing “depending on my inspiration”, or adopting a more thorough way of planning? I was never sure of what method would be best for me. Would I need to plan carefully, or just run with the inspiration? After a few weeks of trying to change my ways of doing, I’ve started to wonder if, in this like in many other aspects of my life and work, it’s not the middle ground that would work best. And recently, it occurred to me that the problem for me exists in two forms: I don’t need outlining for a short story, but I sure do for a novel.
