Both my potential stories beckon to me, but any time I sit down and poke at them, nothing happens. And the one I reeeeaaally like, 'cos it's just the coolest idea everrrrrr, would be as much work as Someone Like You.
Ah, yes, back in the day I was known for my economy of words, would you believe? For hanging back and letting the atmosphere and the silences do all the work... Stories that felt long but were only 4000 words...
I *mostly* write in order. I need some strong but not exact ideas of where the story is going. If I had a detailed outline, I'd never get through, and I can't just jump past a big chunk and get to the good stuff, because then I'll never come back. Both of those for the same reasons: partly because the story needs to be unfolding for me to be enjoying it, partly because what the characters do needs to be based on what happened to them yesterday - and for depth, it needs to be based on the details of what happened yesterday, which don't exist if you haven't written them. But sometimes there are scenes I'm seriously not in the mood for, or need more research, or I just can't figure out how to get the guys into a situation, and then I'll leave some notes of what has to happen and and come back to it.
I think if I were to write the important scenes first, I'd never be interested in the smaller scenes. But also, I don't think it's good to think of them as lesser. Inevitably there will be particularly major turning points that you're excited about, but every scene needs to be a turning point, really. They're not just cooking dinner: Toby is exploring Elliot's home for the first time just as he's starting to think of Elliot as not being Chris, and Elliot is pushing himself past his gay panic to flirt, and their relationship is changing shape to something more domestic, and Chris is rising as a set of assumptions in Elliot's mind to raise the tension for the readers who know that will be a disaster, and we dig in on Toby's drug-past that Elliot learned about last week... And all of those things need to come out of the previous scenes, and feed into the next few scenes. And yes, you can build in a lot of that in later drafts, but it's much easier if you're writing in order, y'know? Or at least have some pretty solid notes for the bits you're missing. If you think of it as filler between the big scenes, it will read that way.
I think that's where plenty of writers go wrong with sex scenes. They write them in because we all want the characters to have sex. But if the sex doesn't have all those threads running through it, tying it to what happened in the last few scenes and the next few, it feels like filler. And filler sex isn't nearly as sexy as Elliot's first intentional groping and his first time looking foward to some proper gay action and what it is about Elliot that made this domestic scene and Toby's behaviour here make him comfortable.
I would like to teach everyone to write exactly the sort of pornography that I want to read.
Anyway.
And sometimes there's a scrap of future dialogue that comes to me which is just what I want, or where I want the story to go, and I'll never turn that down, but it's never a whole scene. I'm very dialogue-driven, these days. Plenty of my drafts are just pages of dialogue with 'ADD BLOCKING' notes all over them.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2018-02-27 11:02 am (UTC)Both my potential stories beckon to me, but any time I sit down and poke at them, nothing happens. And the one I reeeeaaally like, 'cos it's just the coolest idea everrrrrr, would be as much work as Someone Like You.
Ah, yes, back in the day I was known for my economy of words, would you believe? For hanging back and letting the atmosphere and the silences do all the work... Stories that felt long but were only 4000 words...
I *mostly* write in order. I need some strong but not exact ideas of where the story is going. If I had a detailed outline, I'd never get through, and I can't just jump past a big chunk and get to the good stuff, because then I'll never come back. Both of those for the same reasons: partly because the story needs to be unfolding for me to be enjoying it, partly because what the characters do needs to be based on what happened to them yesterday - and for depth, it needs to be based on the details of what happened yesterday, which don't exist if you haven't written them. But sometimes there are scenes I'm seriously not in the mood for, or need more research, or I just can't figure out how to get the guys into a situation, and then I'll leave some notes of what has to happen and and come back to it.
I think if I were to write the important scenes first, I'd never be interested in the smaller scenes. But also, I don't think it's good to think of them as lesser. Inevitably there will be particularly major turning points that you're excited about, but every scene needs to be a turning point, really. They're not just cooking dinner: Toby is exploring Elliot's home for the first time just as he's starting to think of Elliot as not being Chris, and Elliot is pushing himself past his gay panic to flirt, and their relationship is changing shape to something more domestic, and Chris is rising as a set of assumptions in Elliot's mind to raise the tension for the readers who know that will be a disaster, and we dig in on Toby's drug-past that Elliot learned about last week... And all of those things need to come out of the previous scenes, and feed into the next few scenes. And yes, you can build in a lot of that in later drafts, but it's much easier if you're writing in order, y'know? Or at least have some pretty solid notes for the bits you're missing. If you think of it as filler between the big scenes, it will read that way.
I think that's where plenty of writers go wrong with sex scenes. They write them in because we all want the characters to have sex. But if the sex doesn't have all those threads running through it, tying it to what happened in the last few scenes and the next few, it feels like filler. And filler sex isn't nearly as sexy as Elliot's first intentional groping and his first time looking foward to some proper gay action and what it is about Elliot that made this domestic scene and Toby's behaviour here make him comfortable.
I would like to teach everyone to write exactly the sort of pornography that I want to read.
Anyway.
And sometimes there's a scrap of future dialogue that comes to me which is just what I want, or where I want the story to go, and I'll never turn that down, but it's never a whole scene. I'm very dialogue-driven, these days. Plenty of my drafts are just pages of dialogue with 'ADD BLOCKING' notes all over them.