Saturday, February 6, 2010

Day 21 - 1052 Words Of New Material

A few things are beginning to come together. My problem right now is that I am at that stage of the novel where the forest gets lost for the trees. You lose focus because, as you write, your understanding of what the focus is changes. you discover the true focus of the story.

I think a part of my problem, though, is that I spent so much time on screen writing. Screenplays are so focused, you don't even have a forest, you just have a clump of trees that stand in for a forest. I didn't realize that until now, because it seems like it would be the opposite. It seems like the nature of drama and screenplays would help see the big picture better, but they don't.

I am beginning to get back into the broader sense of novel writing again. (I do remember having this problem when I wrote Have Gun, Will Play - and that kicked into focus pretty darned well. Although that was partly point of view.)

Running Total: 21883 Words.


21883 / 70000 words. 31% done!

In Today's Pages: Karla Meets Gwen

2 comments:

Elizabeth Spann Craig said...

Can't see the forest for the trees...that's so true. That's when I just focus on the trees and forget about the forest for a while. Tricky, though.

Elizabeth
Mystery Writing is Murder

The Daring Novelist said...

It's like working on a big painting. You work on it, and then you step back and look at it as a whole, and then get close and work on it again.

Or another metaphor I used to use: piloting a boat, and taking a sounding or a reading off the shore every so often to check where you are.

I figured out today, though, that my problem is genre. I'll talk about that in tonight's post.