Rolling on the dough

[wayfaringwordhack]

After chatting with slmcgaw and then rabiagale, I've narrowed down my playing field to a comfortable dimension. I now have a tentative structure that will allow me to bring in all of the elements that excite me about the location, history, and characters; clearly defined character arcs; and an overarching motif to give the whole the coherency it needed.

Toward the end of our conversation, rabiagale asked me, "Are you always this ambitious?" Yes, I think I am. This time, though, I'm trying not to let the fear of failure confine my ideas and bridle my creativity. But already, even before starting, the certainty that I can't make it work (ie make the final product match the mental dream) is my constant companion in all my research moments.

This afternoon, mana_trini so encouragingly said, "You're insane. What you're proposing sounds so difficult, but I love you because you don't let that insanity brake you." Thank you, love. I think. :-P He then proceeded to say, "You're going to sell this, and then we are going to be so rich. I'm going to have three specialized spearguns and four surf boards and a huge sailboat. Oh man, we're going to be rolling on the dough."

ETA J actually said: "You don't let the FEAR of insanity brake you."

Comments

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

I think reading biographis is a good way to go. I'll need to get my hands on a few. I'm just wondering how much research I need to do before I can lay down a draft. Is it better to have a solid story with good details upfront or a skeleton that can later be personalized, that is the question. As long as it takes me to get material here, I'm sure I'll crack and write a little bit, at least, in the coming weeks. Otherwise the energy for the project might peter out.

[mindseas.livejournal.com]

I think the question of how much research to do depends on your writing personality. Recently I've come to believe that I'm very much a first draft person. Writing a novel for me is sort of like blowing glass. If it doesn't come out right the first time, I can't seem to patch it up. It just shatters. I'm better off throwing it away and trying another piece--or the same piece again but without one word from the previous draft. So I would have to do all the research first, then let it percolate in the subconscious, then write.

But you may be a different sort of writer. Only you know the answer to that.

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

That's a lovely metaphor. Having completed only two books (and one of them still in very rough draft form), I can't rightly say what kind of writer I am. TTD was a project that I just started and did very little research on. Because of my lack of planning and my desire to get it right the first time, it took me 6 years to get a result that might be saleable. With TBU, I didn't want that happening again, so I did a lot of research (gathering info, really), a lot of planning, and then set it aside. When I got back to it, I didn't read through all of my gathered tidbits, just started writing according to my plan. And now I have a very ugly draft on my hands. However, I have noticed that I like to have a pretty clean base and then build from there.

I definitely wouldn't relate my approach to that of sculpting. I build rather than take away to reveal the story.