I find it's absolutely necessary to bounce ideas off someone as I go, since I tend to think crazy things can be made to work. However, I have a lovely goblinfriend who puts up with my ramblings and asks sensible questions and reads pages and thinks everything I do is wonderful, and that is about the level of help I need for a first draft.
At this stage in my life as a writer, I stink at revising. I can see the holes in a manuscript, tear it apart in my head, write an outline that works better and has the right number of characters--but then I have to re-write the whole thing, from the beginning, without copy-pasting anything bigger than a paragraph. Crit-as-I-go from more people helps at that stage, since I need to know whether the characters are working.
The other problem is political sensitivity. I seem to have accidentally written a trans protagonist, for example, who is rather more stereotypical than I thought. In ways around which large sections of my plot hinge. I think perhaps crit-as-I-go would have caught that problem before the bang-head-against-wall stage.
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2012-01-10 06:24 am (UTC)At this stage in my life as a writer, I stink at revising. I can see the holes in a manuscript, tear it apart in my head, write an outline that works better and has the right number of characters--but then I have to re-write the whole thing, from the beginning, without copy-pasting anything bigger than a paragraph. Crit-as-I-go from more people helps at that stage, since I need to know whether the characters are working.
The other problem is political sensitivity. I seem to have accidentally written a trans protagonist, for example, who is rather more stereotypical than I thought. In ways around which large sections of my plot hinge. I think perhaps crit-as-I-go would have caught that problem before the bang-head-against-wall stage.