Etiqueta: start with the end

  • Why to start with the ending? [when writing] p2



    BLOCKED PATH

    Some paths get blocked once you know the outcome. Although it is true you can never know what is happening in reality, the principle of impossible omniscience that helps us from knowing the real reality; and that the thoughts of alive people is almost impossible to know, the least if they’re dead; some actions disappear as soon as you know the outcome.

    Logically, that doesn’t mean there’s a one and only linear way. It only reduces possibilities. It is one’s job to find the correct sequence. Which is something machines do better than humans beings.
    This is what makes writing an impossible process to describe. It is you and you alone who will find how to make it work.

    Thus, it is easier to wipe out what’s there wasting space. And no matter how much, editors claim they want the plot clean of it. I’ve read novels that repeated the same idea thrice! If you were to take out that much out, the novel would have been a movie script. Or a TV series script.

    Nonetheless, it doesn’t mean the 70,000 to 100,000 words some authors can summon out of nowhere are useless. Some people can write that much. Others don’t. I don’t. But I’m not published so this advice might not be good at all.

    Looking backwards is what has you knowing which stone of the way to move for the character to go this or that way into the woods. Or thrown themselves cliff down. Maybe a furious rhino?

    REWINDING

    You can always rewind the tape and review where is it that you lost the logic or when it happened that someone changed their minds. And if your characters are like mine, when to get them into the interrogation room.

    Anyways, this is nonsense and just an opinion. It for sure might be wrong. Oh, and remember, if anything else fails, just have a good time. Pasto kalo.

  • Why to start with the ending? [when writing] p1



    My sometimes endeared and sometimes hated, Isaac Asimov, plus Robert McKee agree in one thing. To write backwards. Which means…


    START WITH THE ENDING

    For Asimov, writing the ending was logic. The same way it is for McKee to solve the main character’s crisis before we write the rest of the story in order for the solution to make sense.

    The technique is good for novices like me who have no idea how to move beyond the start. I always get stuck in the main idea and I can think a lot of ideas to begin but none of them is any good to go on or they are good enough but I can’t make them go on in may possible way.

    ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY


    Hilary Mantel [historical writer] explains that in History, there are some things that acquière an inamovible kind of certainty. This or that battle, the birth date, the death or wedding. Questionable certainty but agreed upon by documents and chronicles ( so long no one burnt such records or altered them).

    Certainty ups the game. You need to get there. You have to imagine and think to recreate what happened. How did it happened. Because what happened in between is what is in the whitest blank. Even with diaries and chronicles, no one knows what someone was thinking or what had them take this decision. You can only imagine.

    TO BE CONTINUED