I find that I work best from somewhere in between "knowing everything that will happen" and "no idea where I'm going with this". With "Prophecy", I had a complete outline to work from -- but still wound up changing and adding a bunch of things, and in fact dramatically changed the resolution.
With "Silver Scales", which has had the best ratio of "level of agony involved in writing' (very little) to "level of actual writing done" (quite a bit and still going after two years, albeit in fits and starts),* I had the resolution within a few weeks of starting it, and my plan for the resolution hasn't changed. But large portions of the middle I didn't know until I got to them, and I never did write an outline for it.
* This is compared to "Prophecy", which I finished in three years with much agonizing, or to any number of high-school-era projects, which I generally abandoned if there was much pain involved in working on them.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Plot
Date: 2005-07-19 03:11 pm (UTC)With "Silver Scales", which has had the best ratio of "level of agony involved in writing' (very little) to "level of actual writing done" (quite a bit and still going after two years, albeit in fits and starts),* I had the resolution within a few weeks of starting it, and my plan for the resolution hasn't changed. But large portions of the middle I didn't know until I got to them, and I never did write an outline for it.
* This is compared to "Prophecy", which I finished in three years with much agonizing, or to any number of high-school-era projects, which I generally abandoned if there was much pain involved in working on them.