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Okay, to thrash another post from another thread.
The thread is: Five irrefutable reasons you need to outline your story before you write it.
(If you're interested in knowing those five irrefutable reasons, they're:
1) Because I said so,
2) Because I said so,
3) Because I said so,
4) Because I said so, and
5) Because I said so.)
Be that as it may. The OP says:
Where he goes badly wrong is this:
The novel on the bookstore shelves is not analogous to a finished building ready for occupancy. The novel on the bookstores shelves is the blueprint for the work of art that the reader will construct in his or her head.
Do you know how the architect arrived at the blueprints he's holding the day construction starts?
You do not.
Maybe the architect drew dozens (or hundreds) of sketches. Maybe he built a model. Maybe she fired up the CAD program. Maybe he figured out where the plumbing was going to run and planned outward from that. Maybe she looked at the landscape, considered contrasting siding materials, then worked inward to what kind of structure would be needed to support them. Maybe it came to him in a dream. Maybe the architect spent a week on the plans. Maybe the architect spent a year on them.
You don't know. You don't care. And it doesn't matter what the process was.
At some point in the process you're just going to have to wing it. Even if you're the most detail-oriented obsessive-compulsive in the world and you plan the plan to make your plans ... at some level you're just going to have to make stuff up.
Either that or find a job outside of the creative arts.
The thread is: Five irrefutable reasons you need to outline your story before you write it.
(If you're interested in knowing those five irrefutable reasons, they're:
1) Because I said so,
2) Because I said so,
3) Because I said so,
4) Because I said so, and
5) Because I said so.)
Be that as it may. The OP says:
I say this is an insane way to write a book. Why? Because you can develop the story, or at least 95 % of it, BEFORE you write a draft. You can engage in the very same wonderful creative exploration process without spending two months of your life writing a draft. When you become an architect of your story in the form of a blueprint, or a sequential outline and a list of checklist-driven components -- imagine a builder arriving at a job site with the intention of "just start building" with the hope of coming up with a functional design after several tries... even King and Deaver would think this is nuts... -- it all goes faster, it's smoother, it's clearer, and it takes a fraction of the time. And what you end up with is orders of magnitude BETTER than if you just winged it.
Where he goes badly wrong is this:
The novel on the bookstore shelves is not analogous to a finished building ready for occupancy. The novel on the bookstores shelves is the blueprint for the work of art that the reader will construct in his or her head.
Do you know how the architect arrived at the blueprints he's holding the day construction starts?
You do not.
Maybe the architect drew dozens (or hundreds) of sketches. Maybe he built a model. Maybe she fired up the CAD program. Maybe he figured out where the plumbing was going to run and planned outward from that. Maybe she looked at the landscape, considered contrasting siding materials, then worked inward to what kind of structure would be needed to support them. Maybe it came to him in a dream. Maybe the architect spent a week on the plans. Maybe the architect spent a year on them.
You don't know. You don't care. And it doesn't matter what the process was.
At some point in the process you're just going to have to wing it. Even if you're the most detail-oriented obsessive-compulsive in the world and you plan the plan to make your plans ... at some level you're just going to have to make stuff up.
Either that or find a job outside of the creative arts.
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