When I’m working on a computer program, I generally will mull a problem over for a long time, sometimes days, before a single line of code is written. This of course appears to the untrained eye that I am “juggling in my office” or “reading The Onion“, but I want to have a full understanding of the problem and understand all the implications before I begin. When I actually actually sit down at the keyboard, the initial coding often comes out in three to four hours of bezerk code rage, followed by two to three days of debugging.

In some ways the same applies to my writing. When I write stories, I generally have a fuzzy idea of what where I am going to go before one word gets written. I generally have an idea of who the people are and signposts the have to hit by the act breaks. The difference is that during the writing process I have a lot more points where I have to take a break and make a decision that affects everything going forward.

A good example is picking a name for the a character. The character’s name should be just a token that identifies them in the fantasy universe, but actually is much more. Once they have a name they have heritage, background, a family history, something kids made fun of growing up, and so much more. Making that one decision can give your character so much life they may no longer want to be bound to the fate you have planned for them.

In my case, I wanted my main character to name his dog “McGuffin”, which is something of a writers joke. I thought that I could make it work if he named it after a relative, and this introduced a Gaelic heritage to the character. Given he lives in the Old West it applies new rules to him that weren’t there before. It gives whole new areas to explore in the piece that I hadn’t planned on.

I think I will keep hacking away at my first draft, but I’ll need to go to the library as well to do some research. Three pages into the first draft and I’m actually starting to feel like a writer.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 11:27 pm and is filed under First Draft, New Animation, nicreations.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.