Fear of doing the wrong thing shouldn’t make us irrationally embrace the way of the shark, moving forward no matter what, and stop us from checking which way we’re going. My point is that it isn’t only important to not let fear of doing the wrong thing stop us from doing anything. Having a record week or month of writing will do no good if we go in a random direction. Just make sure there aren’t problems that will compound down the road. Don’t be irrational and nitpick random details. Then don’t be afraid to take a second look at things before moving on. Understand that we’re going to war and are probably dead. This is why it is important to know that every scene, even the ones we think are brilliant, is screwing up your plot. It becomes so much of an investment that it is extremely painful to remove it from the book, so it doesn’t. Searching down that long wrong turn branch of the maze gets expensive. The problems with scene one affect scene two where even more mistakes are made, which affects scene three, and so on. The danger of moving forward with no regard for what is being screwed up is that a chain of mistakes get made. This is eminently evident in the mentality of NaNoWriMo. I think that it’s definitely important to not be afraid to screw up a scene that we’re not sure of, but everyone in writing is saying this over and over. My wife and I refer to this as screwing it up first. Should the reader already understand that X is the cause of Y but suddenly discover it’s also the cause of Z? Or the other way around? It’s hair-pulling.įor all the plethora of how-to writing resources out there, I haven’t found one that tackles this particular problem. But it’s very hard to parse out what the reader and protagonist should learn, and when. If I were telling you this aspect of the story from the antagonist’s point of view, it would take only three or four sentences. It’s a story where lots of apparently unrelated mysteries all come together to be explained by One Big Thing. But the big a-ha moment, which lays out the central conflict or “mission” for the protagonist, is due in the next few pages.
There are plenty of things that will completely change, like the first five pages, etc. Like many plots, mine is mystery- or suspense-driven.
Look at one paragraph at a time and read it out loud. You may need to write some new sections, transition sentences, or whole paragraphs.