"I got a lot of good ideas! Trouble is, most of 'em suck." --George Carlin
For once, I'm actually not being down on myself with that line. (Mark your calendars.) But it's the first quote that came to mind when I started thinking about this. I do have a lot of good ideas, and the problem isn't that most of them suck.
The problem is that I want to keep all of them.
Most of my early creative process consists of throwing a whole lot of stuff against the metaphorical wall, then trying to sift through everything that's on the wall until I can figure out what's going to stick and what's not. (It also consists of abusing the hell out of the wall metaphor.) But no matter how many times I do this, or how many things I come up with while I'm trying to figure out what a story's really about, the same thing always happens: I have stuff that I really want to keep, but it doesn't work with the rest of the story.
Too much of the time, that moment is the one really cool idea that started the whole thing. So once I've figured out what the story is really about, I still want that thing to happen, but odds are good I've bent some part of the plot into a pretzel trying to accommodate it.
Everything would work better if I didn't need that scene. Or that aspect of that character. Or that bit of world-building that's going to be much fun to work with.
I found the phrase 'attachment to detail' in an update for a game I've supported on Kickstarter, and it stuck with me, because I realized it's something I'm stuck on. It is really hard for me to leave story stuff behind. And I can see how this has caused me problems in the past - book #13, The Book of Lost Runes, ended up feeling like I mashed two stories together because it changed so much in development but I couldn't give up the original concept. As much as I once liked it (clearly I must have, as I sent out nearly a hundred query letters), I can now see that I should have reworked it to go with one major concept instead of trying to blend the two together.
As proof that knowing a problem doesn't means solving a problem, this is giving me trouble even now. The main plot-in-progress that I'm trying to get to work has hit a wall and I think a lot of it is because my original concept for one of the three main characters just doesn't work. So I'm trying to figure out how to re-conceptualize her and seeing how the story's going to change, and . . . and I don't know what to do with it anymore. And it just starts to fall apart.
So in not knowing what to throw away, or sometimes how to throw it away, I can end up losing everything. This is nothing new, but still.
As usual, I now ask: what about the rest of you? How much do you stick to your original ideas? Are you good at getting rid of what doesn't work? And how much do your stories change from your first concepts to the final piece?
My original concept usually sticks, but the details are always open to change. I had a different ending for my third book - even wrote it first, something I never do. But as I outlined the whole story, I realized it didn't fit. So I chucked it and ended the story the way it needed to end.
ReplyDeleteI've had that sort of thing happen a lot, but not until I'm done with a book. My major edits usually involve cutting and adding entire scenes.
DeleteMy basic outline doesn't change, but many other things can. I've cut scenes I didn't want to, but also knew they didn't work as well as I thought they might.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's always a hard thing to deal with, especially if it's something you really want in the story but have to accept that it doesn't fit. >_<
DeleteIf I stuck to my original idea, my first book would've been about fairies and a princess, and it goes downhill from there. So yeah, everything pretty much changed except the main character's earth-given name, his penchant for plants, his relation to fire, and the woman he loves' relation to water. Plot, characters, names, even the world itself changed, and I'm STILL making changes. For instance, just this morning I was thinking the bad guy for book 3 needs slightly different power than the one I gave him. One that would explain why his father doesn't register with anyone's senses (e.g. you touch the guy but you're not actually sure you're touching him) when hero encounters the father in book 2. It would be good if the book3-bad-guy was the one who cause that, that way it could be used against hero to explain why nobody could find him for several years on end. But then, if I go that route, I need to figure out how book3-bad-guy would trap people as stone statues too because that's kind of key to all of book 3 and some details found in book 2.
ReplyDeleteAll that rambling to say, yeah, I change things a lot and I do it all the time. There are key things that I won't let go of (e.g. turning people into stone statues) but a good majority of the rest of the story is subject to change.
That sounds a little like my creative process, though it's less "making major changes to a book" and more "taking things from one potential book and making them part of another". This is part of why I write everything down so that in theory I can keep track of all of that. It doesn't always work.
DeleteI think this is what they mean when they say kill your darlings. It never feels great when I have to cut some cool thing from my story. Sometimes it helps to take the thing I'm going to cut and save it in a different file, so that I still have it if I change my mind, or if not maybe I can still use it for some other project later.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure about that - I've always heard "kill your darlings" as being more about cutting the things that are in the story just because you're proud you wrote them, or something similar. It's not a rule I like, anyway; I don't think there should be any absolute rule for what to cut and what to keep.
Delete