Writing Fast: Can It Really Be Only Utter Crap?
I wonder if I’m right in thinking so, or if I am sort of deluding myself with this belief. I know that more than one writer has said that the first million words (or so) an author writes is crap, and I’m ready to swallow this and go on (although I’m probably past the million already given the amount of writing I do, but let’s consider it as a million words of serious novelling, not blog posts, aborted attempts at stories in junior high, and the likes). Now—and this is more specifically related to the “quantity vs quality” argument—can we consider that every word of every sentence of every first draft will always necessarily be crap, regardless of the years of practice a writer has behind her?Read More
Although this doesn’t work the same for all of us who write, finding names for my characters from the start is for me always an important task. I need the names to resonate with the personality they’re associated with, and I need to be able to name my protagonists, rather than refer to them as “character X and Y”. At times, I’ll need days to find THE name, and it’ll usually be triggered by something totally unrelated. At other moments, the name comes by itself, or I already have it in mind, and develop a personality around it. Both methods work in my case, which is something I’m glad about, yet I must admit that the first one can be annoying—what if the days turn to weeks or even months? Remaining stuck because I lack a name to go on with a story can be very frustrating.
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.
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.
Due to having gotten up way too early for my own sake this morning, yet not being fresh enough to properly work on my NaNovel, I was sifting through my “How to…” book by Orson Scott Card again, and this is when I realized that he had at some point written something that sounded true: in works of sci-fi and fantasy, the way many authors depict the worlds they have created isn’t the same as the way an author in other kinds of fiction would do. Or, should I say, us readers don’t interpret it the classical way, and tend to read between the lines, perhaps.