Broad strokes

Don’t get too hung up on detail, says Adrian Magson

There’s a natural tendency in most writers to want to get things right from the very first word, when all we need to be doing is scoping out scenes and building our basic storyline – doing the groundwork, if you like. Like all groundwork, it won’t look too pretty at first; it needs further tidying up and polishing. Take a look at any new building project and you might wonder how anyone knows what to do next. It looks a mess. Okay, as analogies go it’s not perfect because builders work from detailed plans. But we don’t because we make stuff up as we go along.

The thing is, all-too often we can find ourselves going back and working or re-working a passage even when we’re desperate to be getting on with the story. Which is fine as long as it doesn’t become a distraction from the main story-telling. Whether you work in an edit-as you-go fashion or leave it until later, it’s what is comfortable for you that counts. But remember you can only judge a book in the round, not just from a few chapters.

I look on this distraction potential as a version of the goldfish moment. A horde of pillagers is storming a castle across a drawbridge, when one of them looks down into the moat and exclaims, ‘Ooh, goldfish, everyone! Goldfish!’ (A nod there to The Far Side cartoonist, Gary Larson).

Do I have goldfish moments? Absolutely. All the time. They jump out at me from nowhere, unbidden, unwelcome and downright irritating. I know I should bash the offending query on the head by ignoring it and move on to something else, but that’s easier said than done because I know that in the wee dark hours the scene will come back to haunt me with ifs and maybes and a host of variations on the theme. Cue lack of sleep and annoying the rest of the household.

Too much dwelling on fine detail at the cost of the story merely slows down, or worse, stops progress. And with writing, progress is everything. Without it the idea goes nowhere.

Fortunately I always have something else to work on, whether adding to another project or tackling another scene in the current story. I’m never without alternatives. This takes my mind off the bothersome bit eluding me and allows me to at least get something down rather than torturing myself and ripping out my hair in frustration when a scene won’t gel.

Fortunately, the act of writing invariably brings out other ideas. Some are relevant, some are not. The writing brain feeds on words as you write them down and adds its own dimension, dropping out flashes of inspiration like silent fireworks. Some will get lost in the void because when you’re in writing-hot mode you simply can’t catch everything. Others, though, will stay with you. I work on the basis that if a new idea for a scene stays longer than a few minutes I’ll make a note to look at it later and see if I can incorporate it or not. The beauty of that is that it can lead to a whole new writing project.

And that’s where these extra flashes are valuable, even if at first they seem unconnected, even unusable. Don’t ignore them; they’re new and fresh and bursting out of the moment – and that’s a good thing. Anything new is extremely welcome to a befuddled mind. So get them down on paper and see where they go. If you can’t use them in the current project, save them for another one.

From a reader’s point of view I sometimes see where I believe a flash of inspiration has come to the author simply because the story takes an unexpected turn. Of course they might claim that they had placed an excellent twist in the story which the reader simply didn’t see coming. Quite true.

But I’ve had twists (aka inspiration) jump out at me enough times to know that I can’t plan everything, even if I like to think that I can.

One lesson I have learned is that if I get stuck inextricably on a passage, and nothing I do seems to make it right, it’s usually the writing genie telling me to abandon ship because it’s simply not working at that moment. And if it doesn’t work for me, it’s unlikely to do so for the reader. It might sound tough to scrap something over which you’ve been sweating buckets, but once you start to find another way round the problem, you’ll also discover a whole host of new words and ideas to go with it. Win-win.

The other thing to remember about editing taking its place in the scheme of things is that when you start to look at your completed story with a critical eye you will find areas where you need to beef it up a little and give it more depth and colour – or whittle down a passage that has become a touch overblown. This is a natural and important part of writing because only when you read through the story as a whole will you gain insight into where important changes can be made.