The devil is in the details

Despite what I said in my post “my greatest weakness as a writer,” I’ve found the most important part of writing, especially to not get writer’s block, is to not get caught up in the details.

I should explain what I mean by this. When you are writing a novel you are faced with a horde of details you have to think out. Often you will come to a detail that you haven’t completely thought out yet. You then have two choices:

 

1. Stop writing while you think about this detail to its full extent
2. Place a filler word in your prose and keep on with your writing and come back later to replace that word with something more fitting to your story.

 

Let me give you an example. Say you have a character that you need, for story reasons, to be proficient in a martial art. If your story is set in the far future on a planet that isn’t earth or in a fantasy world, it is highly unlikely that any martial art they have would be called the same name as a martial art on earth. Someone four thousand years in the future or in Middle-Earth (not that you would use Middle-Earth of course) would not be a master of Karate or Krav Maga or any other earth martial art. Even if you have a culture that is descended from an Earth culture, they would have developed their own culture and martial arts.

 

Not to mention the fact that if, for example, you decide to use a known martial art, such as krav maga, you are opening yourself up to be critiqued by every Krav Maga practitioner. You are also limiting yourself to only krav maga moves when perhaps you will need something different in your story.

 

So when you come to the scene where you are introducing the fact that your protagonist knows a martial art, either through a training scene or through an encounter with random street hood #1 and you’re writing and your imagination is firing and the scene is magically coming to life on the page and then you come to the part where you name the martial art, what do you do? Well if you haven’t thought about it beforehand you use a generic martial art and keep on writing. Once you’ve finished the scene, then you think about what you actually want to call it.

 

Of course some details you should think about beforehand. You don’t want to be like that student in creative writing class who just wrote in person 1 and person 2 for the characters and told his teacher that he would just copy/paste in the names later when he got around to naming them. Some details, such as everything about your characters (at least as far as the background you will need) or your world/universe/dimension (at the very least try to think about what kind of government your medieval fantasy city is using and other background details that have an effect on your story setting) have to be thought out beforehand. If you haven’t decided on the basic details of what you are writing then you shouldn’t be writing a scene, you should be coming up with all those details.

 

You may be a pantser (someone who writes without planning out what you are going to write and just lets their creativity take them ergo, writing by the seat of their pants) in which case you will of course have to come back and go over all the details later once you’ve finished your first draft.

 

In the end, the most important thing is to not let yourself get so caught up in trying to describe one tree that you forget to describe the forest. Don’t get stuck on one detail that you keep from getting on with your writing. The wonderful thing about writing is that you can always come back to something and change it (until you’ve published of course in which case you’re stuck with it).

 

When I first started writing my novel, I was having a hard time progressing because I kept going back to what I had already written and making changes or editing instead of getting on with writing the rest of the story. I’ve now learned to ignore those urges. I have a file in scrivener with a numbered list of all the changes I feel I need to make once I finish the first draft of my book. These changes range from making sure some information is seeded in previous chapters to what scenes I feel I need to rewrite in order to match the changes I made to the story as I was writing later chapters.

 

In the end, whatever you do, let your creative juices flow and if you feel you didn’t write something exactly the way you imagined it, you can always come back later on to make it right.