In which she plagiarises herself with due acknowledgement

[zeborah]

Justine Larbalestier has been running a series of NaNoWriMo tips, the latest of which is Rather than come to a grinding halt why not square bracket it?.

My response got really long so... well, I posted it anyway, but thought I may as well make the most use of it, so here it is again!

One caveat is that while this works really well for some writers, for others... Well, for me, skipping scenes with square brackets has two bad consequences:

1) It means I write all the easy parts of the book first, meaning I have to write all the hard parts later in a single chunk, meaning I probably won't finish the book. Whereas if I force myself to write entirely in order, I can use a future easy-and-fun scene as a reward for getting through a hard scene.

2) This always happens to me if I try it. Seriously, *always*. When I go back to write that scene in the nuclear reactor, Janice spots the strange man, prevents him setting the bomb, but discovers an even greater danger is afoot, and I have to scrap and rewrite absolutely everything that came after that now-obviated car explosion.

So I've stopped doing that.

I still use square brackets (or, rather, a black apple-shaped character that you can get on Macs by holding down shift-option-k -- the advantage is that it stands out really well when you're skimming) to signal minor gaps in research (eg "Change this fake Latin into real Latin!", "Find out the name of a random Catholic nobleman in 1527 Copenhagen!", and "Check the previous book for the location of that abandoned church!") It doesn't work so well for major gaps in research ("Read 134 digitised pages of manuscript 14th century Danish provincial law to find out the punishment for abducting and torturing a fellow nobleman!" -- fortunately said manuscript turned out to have an index) because again, the difference between arresting the perpetrator or just fining him is going to make the plot go in wildly different directions.

Also I know people who can't even use square brackets for character names, because for them changing the name changes the entire personality and thus the plot. Fortunately I don't have that problem myself, and change character names all over the place whenever I discover that I've got 5 men called "Hans" and half a dozen other people with names beginning with "B".

--But yeah, anyway. Not to deny the fact that, for those writers for whom it works, square brackets really are a godsend!

Comments

[painoarvokas.livejournal.com]

Reminds me somehow of the old saw, "if it works, don't fix it". Of course, that's dangerous advice to a writer, since a writer should improve :)

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I'm with you all the way on the use of square brackets, or in my case double pointy brackets (they stand out better).

If I'm writing normally, I've learned (like you) that I need to push on through the difficult scene. Jumping ahead leads to bad consequences. On the other hand, bracketing things that are minor points of research that you don't want to stop and do right then in mid flow, is a helpful technique.

I haven't done any world building on my NaNo novel, so putting <<insert bit of appropriate medical jargon here>> means that I can keep going and I'll go back and fill in the blanks at the revision stage. But it's only local flavour, not something that's going to alter the plot.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Otoh, if I find the rest of the story filled in and the reactor scene still in brackets, often it means the story didn't NEED the reactor scene.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

And then there was the time I wrote 93K of easy bits. When I started the rewrite, at around 35K, I noticed that not only did I have to rewrite, well, almost everything, I also didn't have a plot. _At all_. Which meant that if I continued writing, I still wouldn't have a book.

I still haven't managed to find the plot because I've got so many scenes that it remained hidden from view.

[chuk-g.livejournal.com]

I thought I invented the square bracket thing earlier this year. Seems to be working so far but I haven't used it in anything big enough that writing all the hard bits at once would be a significant problem. (And I still like it as a placeholder for undone research.)