My brief experiment with writing on impulse yesterday has mainly reassured me that what I thought earlier was true: I can sustain discovery writing for about 10,000 words and then it becomes so aimless as to be completely useless. Also, it tends to lead to entire scenes that probably don’t even need to exist. I wrote a thrilling escape scene, except if I were to expand that into an entire story, I would probably end up cutting that escape scene, since the entirety of its impact on what might eventually be the plot is to strand some characters in the middle of a jungle where the actual plot occurs. I did not really figure out what the central conflict of one of my characters was until near the end, have not figured out what the central conflict of the other is at all (though I have some ideas), and I’m not certain the character relations were actually very well thought through. I plotted them all out from scratch in just a few hours.
Whole thing got me to 33,827 out of 35,000, which is still badly behind but at least isn’t falling any more behind. I also think I have a proper outline just about sorted and still enough time left to catch up at 2k words a day (barely!), so we’ll see how this goes.
Chamomile Has A Blog 