[gmw]

Originally Posted by Hitch

[...] Honestly, it would drive me bonkers to write, write, write and NOT know how I was going to wrap up the end, or, like GMW wrote, not know what that sibling was going to do, or how she'd tie into everything. Waiting for that Eureka! moment? I could never do it. I'd live in dread that it would never come, and I would have to go back and revamp and rejigger everything to make it work, due to some horrible oversight. [...]

Part of it is an act of faith. A lot of it is the fact that I'm not doing it for a living, so it doesn't really matter how long it takes or if I end up throwing it all away*. But most of it is the experience: I'm telling myself the story. In my writing journal l once made the equivalence of: writing is to reading as reading is to watching the movie. For me, writing is like reading a fascinating story intended just for me, but a story that evolves over months rather than hours or days. I get to see so much more than the reader ever will. It doesn't always work, which can be disappointing, but sometimes it pleases me very much, which is a buzz.

If I was truly serious/professional about the process I would do it differently ... but at the moment I suspect the result would be rubbish, I don't have that sort of talent ... or maybe it's just something that I still have to learn.

* pendragginp, I don't meant that literally, my notes folders are littered with attempts at scenes or stories that didn't work but I can't quite delete.

Originally Posted by Lemurion

When I write myself into a corner I have a giant robot punch its way into the room through the wall.

While giant robots may not fit every genre, I think the idea has merit. By throwing a spanner in the works I force the characters to react and break them out of whatever's holding up the story.

I like this idea very much. I can imagine flicking through my collection of story ideas - most of which are just tiny snippets that will never make a complete story - and throwing them into a stuck mix to break it up. As long as you're careful not to turn it into a deus ex machina (it shouldn't be used to solve problems, just to mix things up a bit) it could work very well.

... It seems to me that we've identified that: sometimes a story needs more, and sometimes a story needs less, and sometimes a story has exactly what it should if you look at it the right. So all we writers have to do is work out which situation we're facing.