Well, this is interesting (I think?)
May. 5th, 2008 07:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceFamously, I don't make notes of ideas as I have them. Neither do I, from choice, write synopses; I like not to know where a book is going, to discover the journey hand in hand with the reader, as it were. (This is for values of 'like' that include total panic at frequent intervals, obviously; I just think that for me, it makes better books. If I plan a story out, then I follow the plan like a route-march, which all feels a little mechanical; if I let it happen day by day, then there's a whole lot more that gets a chance to feed into the story, including all the character development as we go. Plot is what people do, and if people change en route then the plot can change with them, unhindered. Someone once said that being asked to write a synopsis for a book they hadn't written yet was like being asked to draw a map of a country they hadn't visited; I like that...)
Anyway. A while back, a year or more, I was writing a sort-of horror book for kids, at the same time as I was writing an SF novella for grown-ups, turn and turn about; but then rewrites for something else came in, and I had to put at least one of those projects down, so it was the kids' book that was set aside. I had just reached a good stopping-point, five chapters in; also I had just had the sudden revelation that made sense of the plot-thus-far, I knew at last just where it was heading.
So I wrote the novella, and then I worked on the rewrites, and and and; and I never got back to the kids' book till now. Where of course I realise that I have entirely forgotten that sudden revelation, and I now have no idea where the book was headed.
I worked through the extant 20K words, revising and cutting, to see if that would help; it did not. I didn't make notes, because I don't, and whatever that inspiration was, it is lost.
So this evening I went for a stroll to think things through, and came back with a totally other idea that works absolutely. Whether it works as well as the original, we will never know; but for certain sure this is not it, and for certain sure this works extremely well. Which I think is the first time I've ever had a significant chunk of book branch off in two contrary directions (it's one of those nodes in the multiverse, is what it is: somewhere out there is another world, where I did remember the original version...).
I think this is cool, and it totally justifies my shruggish attitude, "if I forget something lovely, hell, I'll just think of something else..." There is always another idea out there, waiting.
Anyway. A while back, a year or more, I was writing a sort-of horror book for kids, at the same time as I was writing an SF novella for grown-ups, turn and turn about; but then rewrites for something else came in, and I had to put at least one of those projects down, so it was the kids' book that was set aside. I had just reached a good stopping-point, five chapters in; also I had just had the sudden revelation that made sense of the plot-thus-far, I knew at last just where it was heading.
So I wrote the novella, and then I worked on the rewrites, and and and; and I never got back to the kids' book till now. Where of course I realise that I have entirely forgotten that sudden revelation, and I now have no idea where the book was headed.
I worked through the extant 20K words, revising and cutting, to see if that would help; it did not. I didn't make notes, because I don't, and whatever that inspiration was, it is lost.
So this evening I went for a stroll to think things through, and came back with a totally other idea that works absolutely. Whether it works as well as the original, we will never know; but for certain sure this is not it, and for certain sure this works extremely well. Which I think is the first time I've ever had a significant chunk of book branch off in two contrary directions (it's one of those nodes in the multiverse, is what it is: somewhere out there is another world, where I did remember the original version...).
I think this is cool, and it totally justifies my shruggish attitude, "if I forget something lovely, hell, I'll just think of something else..." There is always another idea out there, waiting.