Hello, folks!
News:
I’m heading down to IHOP Con tomorrow. It’s at the American Fork IHOP at 1pm, spear-headed by DJ Butler. This will be my first time going to this particular writing convention, so we’ll just have to see how it works out! At the very least it’ll be nice to eat some delicious food and talk with fellow writers! I’ll let you know how it went next week!
On the writing front, I got over 12,000 words written this week, which not only reached my official goal but also accomplished my stretch goal! Even more would be nice, but hey! Progress is progress! I did some rough calculations and if I can keep up this pace I should be on track to finish the draft by around the end of August! Even if I slow down a little, I should be comfortably able to finish by mid September! The original goal was the end of August, so I’m going to try to shoot for that! As long as I can figure out how to write a big scene with infrared that will have ramifications for the end of the novel, I should be good to go!
And speaking of those tiny details that can potentially derail everything…
Writing Tip:
How to Handle research!
Ideally, you want to do most of your general research for a given book during the initial brainstorming/worldbuilding phase so that you’ve got the background needed to then outline your story, getting any specific research done during the outline phase in order to make sure that things generally work and make sense. But there will always be details you miss or which will pop up unexpectedly.
While drafting, I’ve created a document called “Little Details To Fix” which is a place where I list any little things (names, titles, exact type of pistol, etc.) where some thinking or research is needed but where it won’t actually change anything about the plot if that detail changes. That way I can just make a note and then keep writing. A battle might be all about momentum, but writing is the same way, and the more you can avoid disrupting your momentum while drafting the better.
A similar trick you can use is to be intentionally vague in a way that lets the reader interpret things for themselves or where you use a character’s lack of expertise to your advantage. If your character doesn’t know the difference between a Ferrari, a Lamborghini and a Porsche, then you can just call it a “sports car” and save yourself a headache. Similarly, as long as you’re not too far off on your gun facts, saying your character is using a “modified (type of gun)” lets those who care about such things figure out exactly what modifications it would take to achieve the results shown in your story and allows everyone else to just enjoy the action.
Some issues are a bit bigger, changing how an entire scene or more will play out, and for those specific cases it’s okay to stop and do a bit of research, as long as you remember that your goal is to find the answer to your question as quickly as possible so that you can get back to writing. It’s all too easy to get sucked down a black rabbit hole for hours at a time learning about cool things “that might be vaguely useful for your story” or even which weren’t but which still sucked you in anyway.
Wikipedia, Quora, Reddit, YouTube, TvTropes.com,…the list goes on. You probably know which places are more likely to waste your time than actually helping you to learn what you need. Your time and especially your writing time is valuable, so don’t waste it. One trick that you can use is that if you just want to spend some time going down rabbit holes and maybe finding something useful, do that during your free time/break time, NOT during your writing time.
And lastly, it’s okay to just skip the research and make your best guess sometimes! I know this might sound like heresy, but some details are irrelevant. Most of your readers probably won’t know every little detail either, and won’t know or care if you mess up. Sometimes you just can’t find out everything you feel you need to know about something, and that’s okay. You can get feedback from experts after the fact, or just see what kind of feedback your regular proofreaders give you. At the end of the day you’re trying to tell a good story, and if you did that, it’s okay if it’s not perfect.
Now go forth and enjoy some stories, your own, or somebody else’s!
Eulalia!!!
Timothy Kuhn