Thank you -

As an additional offering, keep writing down those ideas. Some are probably pretty neat, right? Perhaps not wide enough, high enough, etc., to create an entire story. On the other hand, you can probably use them as subplots or even scenes/sequences on some bigger concept. Sure nothing wrong with that.

As you’re designing for your big idea, glance over at some of your “quickies.” You might be able to twist them into a very satisfactory sequence which carries your story along.

Keep writing that synopsis, perhaps as part of the initial design process. Knowing where your Plot Points, Mid-Point Shift and Pinch Points set, some of your “lesser” ideas might well serve as part of the road from one to another.

In writing my Sorcerer novels, I had several scenes, revelations, or what have you that I knew I wanted. I had a good idea when in time they should be, then stitched together a sequence of actions to get from one to the other. Many of these sequences involved smaller ideas/concepts which forwarded the overall concept.

One blog somewhere said that nothing you write is really wasted. I agree to some extent. Practice does make perfect, if you’re practicing the correct thing the correct way. When I started the first Sorcerer novel, the target genre was erotica, so there had a lot of sex. I eventually decided I was satisfied I could deliver a decent sex scene (I found out, just as other erotica writers did, that it’s really tough after the fifth or sixth scene), that the sexual acts took a back seat to the characters’ emotional involvement with each other during the sex.

There’s 40,000 words of sex scenes I deleted from the first two novels, not including trimming most of the others down to probably 50% of the original. These are ideas that didn’t work out to contribute to the story progress.

Beyond the sex, there were several ideas I looked at developing, but decided not to do so — they were “good” ideas but didn’t contribute sufficiently to the story.

None of this “extra” writing which I later either didn’t develop or edited out was wasted, though. They were practice in exactly what I was attempting to deliver.

Get the sky-high idea. Plop it into the 4-Part Structure and see if it works out. Now brainstorm it some more and make it even bigger; perhaps that original idea/concept now makes an excellent Plot Point.

“When you investigate a virtuoso, you find he’s practiced fundamentals probably 90% of his time even before he spends 10% working on the actual part or piece. Now he can deliver the emotional experience.”

Thank you, Larry. And good to know you Bruce.

It’s deep stuff. Thanks for taking us deeper. L.

The first are the things this post (great stuff from Bruce) discusses and you beat us over the head with (necessarily, I admit). Fundamentals are everything in any act you do. Writing a story, playing an instrument, building solid software. You need those fundementals.

However just doing the practice over and over won’t cut it. You have to go find examples to help wrap your mind around what the goal of your practices are. What things do you want to see in the final result, based on other final results that worked. Once you are past a certain point, this becomes much less necessary, as you know the rules well enough to break them wisely and to great effect. But until you’ve seen others do it well, THEN taken that knowledge to practice these fundamentals, it’s just masturbation. SOMETHING must shape your goal.

I think that’s one of the things I liked best about your story structure book, Larry. It used an extremely concrete example with Dan Brown’s super huge selling book to show what the pieces of SS were, and then you explained what the benefits of him doing it that way were, and why we should follow suit. It gave me a deeper appreciation for what you were trying to convey (though I already felt a resonance with your posts before then) and I have never actually read The DaVinci Code, amusingly enough.

It does make me wonder if there is a specific point of rough balance between examining and practicing that must be sought as a starting point before you begin deviating to find your own road. Though how one could figure out such a thing is beyond me, my knowledge about learning mostly comes from reading blog posts on the topic.

Hopefully the discussion continues, it has given me a lot to think about, and from the prior post it sounds like many others as well.