I've been thinking about writing for a while. (Well, duh. But -) Yet I've always thought of writing as sort of like reading a book in reverse. It's all about fixing your mind on a single story, and finding out what happened, and writing it down.
Masterpieces (in the realm of art) are created by drawing from (punpunpun) sources you've got in your head, in your hands, and in the many files cluttering your room. Da Vinci probably didn't decide, at age 12, "Okay, time to paint the Mona Lisa. First I need to figure out how to paint humans, and then I need to figure out backgrounds, and then study lighting and color. . ." Rather, Mona Lisa probably came to him later in life, and she manifested herself out of vestiges of this and that from all of the experience and images and knowledge in da Vinci's head. Before there was Lisa there were countless other paintings of women and use of dark folds of cloth and studies of distant, hazy mountains.
What if I've been thinking about writing all wrong? I started with an idea for a masterpiece at age 12 and thought if I researched enough and worked on the same story long enough, I could force it to be the masterpiece I wanted?
What if it's really about studies?
A study is a smaller, less elaborate drawing or painting of the image you're planning to create (or a part of the image). Before you paint a person, you might paint a study of the person's skin colors, clothing colors, where the sunlight falls on their face, etc. You might draw a study of human proportions or just practice painting some little scraps of paper over and over.
Why haven't I been using this technique in writing?
Why not do studies of smaller excerpts for larger pieces of work?
These are what we call writing prompts.
I've been doing those for a while, but I've never made the connection or realized how one could be intentional about it. Pick your novel apart into little scenes, little ideas. Play with those ideas. Invent theoretical scenes in which completely different characters, not from your novel, have to go through similar situations to your characters. Or insert the characters from your novel into a situation that's not in your novel. Write these "studies." Throw them away! (Don't actually throw them away. Your kids will want to dig through all your old writing scraps and cry over them when you're dead. :) These are only steps along the way, building blocks in the goal to reach a great towertop!
Writing a novel isn't just a process you do but a process you practice.
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