Fossils and Blind Alleys.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Discovery writers (raises hand, waving wildly) are not filled constantly with the pure essence of creativity, and so spend some time trying to muscle the story into shape.\u00a0\u00a0 Intellect (invaluable in revision) with\u00a0 its conscious logic replaces instinct (invaluable in primary creation)\u00a0 with its unconscious logic.\u00a0 Sometimes intellect and instinct agree.\u00a0 Sometimes they don’t.\u00a0\u00a0 When they don’t, instinct is nearly always right…especially in terms of the deep logic of the plot, or “what really happened.”<\/p>\n
Passages written under fully conscious intellectual control by a discovery writer are always suspect.\u00a0\u00a0 In my case, about 70% of these will turn out to be close to what really happened, and 30% will be dead wrong.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Dead wrong can mean “that never happened in any way shape or form”\u00a0 or “that didn’t happen here, it happened later–you missed this whole very important chunk in between that illuminates past and future” or “interesting, but not really part of this story.”\u00a0 Fossils are bits of earlier drafts that survive into the current draft where they’re\u00a0 wrong (thanks to changes during revision.)<\/p>\n
“Dead wrong” includes everything from phrases referring to other events to entire chapters.\u00a0 Long stretches of coherent but dead wrong text are known as “blind alleys”\u00a0 (by me.\u00a0 Other writers may call them something else.)\u00a0 I may spend days writing what seems to be primary story only to find out later…no.\u00a0 It happened in the Deed<\/em>, and I found another one yesterday.<\/p>\n Tiptoeing gingerly through the narrative to make this bit of writing craft clear without dropping spoilers…in this chapter I knew that Major Character A (viewpoint for the chapter) was going to get an important message, grant an important boon to someone, go on a journey in response to the important message, and find out about what might (or might not) be a conspiracy against a friend.\u00a0\u00a0 Back when I wrote it first, there were surrounding chunks I didn’t yet know, so I wrote what seemed logically likely to be in those chunks.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Some parts of this long section came in nice (but short) creative-mind bursts and others didn’t.<\/p>\n By the time I first did some revision work on this chapter, I’d written some of the surrounding chunks but not all, and revised it to conform to that–but I’d also written some of the surrounding chunks as “it must surely have happened this way” conscious logic, not “This happened” as handed out by the plot daemon.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Both the final plot-bomb and reaching the end of the book last Tuesday illuminated “what really happened” and made the papier-mache-ish patches visible.\u00a0 As I worked my way toward this particular blind alley, it began to look blinder and blinder (actually, it’s more like a series of blind apparent hallways off a hall that really does go somewhere.)<\/p>\n Finding the real end of Book III meant cutting off everything beyond that (in time) and consigning it to a later book.\u00a0\u00a0 But what happens in this chapter is the foundation for what Character A does (and experiences)\u00a0 in the cut-off part.\u00a0\u00a0 Even as I felt my way toward what really happened, based on the revisions up to that point (some of which involved other characters that Character A knows and interacts with) I realized that errors cascaded downstream…if the consequence of the boon were as stated in a section of the cut-off bit written in response to plot-daemon revelations (the plot daemon is always right, when I understand), then other things in this chapter had to change, too.\u00a0\u00a0 And if Character C does this other thing (which in fact happened and is totally right) then the apparent conspiracy against C would have a different slant.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A point of timing becomes crucial that I hadn’t thought was crucial.<\/p>\n And all this gobblygook means that Chapter 22 (as presently numbered)\u00a0 has to be dissected very carefully, with precise sequencing in relation to things in other chapters.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Is A still where A was in this chapter when the brown stuff hits the rotating blades for C and another character?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Where is<\/em> A at that point if not in the middle of it?\u00a0\u00a0 When does A find out?\u00a0 What other chapters need to be searched for fossils of that earlier version?<\/p>\n I hope to have Chapter 22 sorted, and the likely location of fossils relating to it located and marked, by day’s end.\u00a0\u00a0 (No, this doesn’t mean I’m 2\/3 done.\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve leapt ahead to an area suspected of needing major work.\u00a0 And yup, it did.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fossils and Blind Alleys.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Discovery writers (raises hand, waving wildly) are not filled constantly with the pure essence of creativity, and so spend some time trying to muscle the story into shape.\u00a0\u00a0 Intellect (invaluable in revision) with\u00a0 its conscious logic replaces instinct (invaluable in primary creation)\u00a0 with its unconscious logic.\u00a0 Sometimes intellect and instinct agree.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,45,5],"tags":[62,51,107],"class_list":["post-978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-craft","category-revisions","category-the-writing-life","tag-craft-of-writing","tag-revision","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=978"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":979,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978\/revisions\/979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}