Writing Report February 15, 2020

One of the least helpful bits of writing advice I’ve encountered is “Finish everything you start; you can always edit or rewrite later.”

In his effort to impart some carpentry wisdom on me, my father taught if you screw up at the beginning of a project and don’t fix it right then, it will only throw everything else off and, when it’s done, will look like crap and need to be redone anyway and probably still won’t look as good as it would have if you just threw out what you did wrong at the beginning and start afresh.

This lesson really got hammered home when I was a staff writer.  

If I was writing a script and something in it was wrong, it slowed the actual writing process down to a dreary slog.  Days would be added to the writing schedule, even for a short cartoon.

And when completed, it just lay there dead on the paper, like a mackerel at the fish market, and any attempts to revive it only resulted in an ugly Franken-fish that might twitch spasmodically but really couldn’t be called alive.

So I learned the moment I hit a rough patch to give up.

That meant going back and finding where the story went off the rails.

Sometimes it was with the very first scene.

Sometimes it was with the basic plot structure.

Sometimes it was with the character relationships.

Didn’t matter:
Find where it stopped working and jettison everything past that point.

So what if it’s days of work?

Get rid of it.

Kill your darlings, but kill your slackers as well.

Case in point:
The latest Q’a story I’m writing.

I have a good basic plot, and it started off well enough, but one scene it and it became a damn morass.

I should be belting out 3-5,000 words a day easily on this.

Instead it’s like pulling teeth.

Okay, go back, look at what I’m doing.

What’s screwing me up?

Why is this one just laying there while the other two -- 

…ah…that’s it.

My opening is pretty much a revamp of the opening of the second Q’a story (the one that has yet to be published).

Same plot beats / similar characters / similar character interplay.

Some people can have a blast writing the same thing over and over.

Not me.

So, what to do?

Well, jettison everything that resembles the story already written.

Kiss that guard captain good-bye.

Both stories have Q’a climbing to get inside her objective.

Change that ASAP.

The first fight scene is just padding as it doesn’t change the outcome of what follows it.

Get rid of that (but try to come up with something else for Q’a to do to keep her active -- other than climbing).

So now I’m feeling better about the story.

Gotta throw out a couple of thousand words, but that’s okay.

They were the wrong words.

© Buzz Dixon