There's a Method...?

One of my writing friends, Kate Lang, posted yesterday her frustrations with plotting, GMC, characterization... yada, yada, yada. You've heard it from me, too. Get a great idea (usually the characters come to me first, with maybe a couple of scenes) and you're ready to go. You boot up the computer and start typing as fast as your fingers can go.

Several pages into it (and sometimes after you've written 45,000 words or so), you discover that what you wrote is crap. Oh, the words are pretty, and you've got some great one-liners in there that really make the reader (or critiquer) sit up and take notice. I almost always get a few "Ha!" or "I love this!" type of comments from my critique partners. But then comes the "why would the heroine do this? It doesn't make sense" and the "why is the hero thinking this?"

Aargh.

Well, I've already told you how I've completely scrapped the current wip I'm working on. Started rewriting it, via cut and paste/splice and dice, add a bit here, take a bit out there... Got to about 23,000-24,000 words and thought, well, this is crap, too. This ain't gonna work.

So, I stopped and thought about GMC some more. And decided to try this with a novel log. Make notes every day about the scene I'm going to write. Make a contract with myself to write a certain number of words. So far, so good.

But --and here's the good part -- after I'd thrown together most of the GMC, I bounced some of my ideas off my critique partners and they helped me fine-tune it. It makes sense now. Now, I can sit down to write.

Writing is a lonely business. But to have friends who are there when you need them, who understand what you're trying to accomplish, who gently and with love prod you until you're headed in the right direction (sometimes a complete 180)... priceless.