Autolysis · 9:35pm Jul 21st, 2016
Hi. First time posting. Very long-time lurker. Female. Singaporean. About to leave for university for the first time. Animation major. Love small pastel equines.
Here are thoughts:
What keeps surprising me about writing long stories is how much stuff just gets frickin' derailed when you fill in the earlier blanks. Once-important characters stop existing, or change their motivations, so they don't end up doing what they needed to do. So many events that were supposed to happen later suddenly no longer make sense once the parts before them get written.
I can't reiterate this enough: Things planned out and written way in advance just don't happen. Entire plotlines evaporate midstream. Characters die and are reborn, over and over. The story destroys itself as it is built.
I guess that wouldn't happen if the outline was airtight, but I'll never know.
Wish I had helpful advice, but I've never written anything over 15,000 words. I think that you need to rewrite a long story after the first draft anyway, whether you used an outline or not. "Do you rewrite aggressively after the first draft?" is a more-important question than "Do you outline?"
4107113 The thing about aggressive rewriting is that while the plot gets tighter and the prose becomes more polished and more controlled, the initial momentum is lost. This scene should be constantly moving forward, but looking over it again, I want to tweak this, and this… and what was supposed to be a fast-paced sequence becomes a description-fest bogged down by details. What’s more, the character’s voice seems to get lost. I look at earlier drafts and notice that they are worse, but the character is more there. More alive. And I’m not sure how to reproduce that life without taking off the polish and control.
All of which I understand can be fixed with yet more rewriting, but for a longer serial, there's a limit to my patience and impetus to revise.
Also: Hi Bad Horse!
Would just like to add here that your stories and blog posts are an inspiration and an education. Thank you for writing them. I’ve learnt more from them than any creative writing lesson I’ve ever had (admittedly not a high bar, because they boiled down to ‘use bigger words’, ‘show, never tell’ and 'instant drama, just add vehicular accidents'). Scene structure cures bad dialogue in particular has helped me pinpoint and iron out a lot of problems in my short stories. Before reading it, I don’t think I even had a draft folder.
4107239 Thanks!
I've heard others say similar things about their first drafts, and I've given up having an opinion about it. It varies too much from person to person.