Quote:
Originally Posted by rkomar
I'm not a writer, but I'm curious about the creative process. Does it not suffer if you can only get to it intermittently, with perhaps long gaps in between? How do you maintain flow? Won't characters evolve in your mind over a long period beyond what you've written in the past?
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It's good and bad. What I find is that sometimes going back to something after not working on it for a while helps me look at it with fresh eyes. Sometimes I will go back and read sections and realize something didn't come out with the feel or impression that I meant it to have. I also find issues with flow or other issues that maybe I wouldn't have otherwise. I think that it can be easy to get into a real key pounding frenzy and get blinded by the flow of ideas and it can make it more difficult to spot issues.
On the other hand, too long of a time off and you might lose direction or maybe even your style changes slightly. It would be best if you can do something in the middle. Don't get so caught up in the work that you are blind to structural and flow issues but don't take so much time off that you screw up the feel and diretion.
I stopped working on one novel because I left it sit so long that my writing style changed so much it would require a complete rewrite. I was one of my first attempts at writing and it sat for a year. So, after a year of working on shorter works my style and quality of writing didn't match and the novel would have looked like two different people wrote it.
