Thoughts.

[snitchnipped]

• You can learn a lot about a character just by writing them being drunk.  Stuff came out that I wasn't expecting.  I learned:  "Wow, yeah, that's where we're going now with this.  I guess it was meant to be."  Unexpected turns are unexpected.  And valuable.

• Note to self:  try writing drunk.
  

• There has been a sad history of elephant captivity.
  
  
• Probably the most challenging thing is character naming.  They've got to mean something, fit the characters/world/time-period, and not sound stupid.  My Elephant is not a Mary Sue, so I need to be careful her name doesn't sound like one.
  
  
• It's amazing how much I've written already that I won't even use in this story.  Is that common?  Some of it was intentional, some unintentional.  I discovered one of the first scenes I wrote actually takes place in two years, so it can't be used. 
  
  
• One of the main things I've learned is the concept of restraint—not to lay everything out on the table, and if you do, don't do it all at once.  Be it character descriptions, plot, setting, whatever.  I can get all Tolkienish and describe everything down to a T if I wanted, but I'm purposefully forcing myself to hold back, especially more this time than with Dichotomy.  I have to let the plot speak for itself and back out of Edmund and Susan's minds a bit more.  Even though being in Ed's head is awesome.
  
  
• Wow, I had no idea you could track traffic stats on ff.net.  The ratio of story hits to reviews is alarming! 

Comments

[h-dash-h.livejournal.com]

I really dislike coming up with character names myself, and tend to obsess over it. One of the best things about fanfic- the characters usually come with names.

In my admittedly limited experience, I, too, write *far* more than actually ends up in the story. The one time I didn't (the Invisibles crossover), it was soon very clear that I should have. And yes, a lot of it gets filed away and will show up in some form or another later (assuming I get some inspiration again- it's been in short supply so I've been reading more than writing recently).

And again I agree- restraint is difficult. So much of the best fiction writing works in part because the world is larger than what you are shown. The real world is like that, and when you can tell that the fictional world exists beyond the page at hand, it feels more real. This is why Tolkien had and continues to have such an impact within Fantasy. The amount of world building and writing that he *didn't* publish is tremendous, but it all hovers around the edges of what he did.

Narnia, as much as I love it, was clearly built a bit more piecemeal. Although to be fair, the first version of The Hobbit didn't fit the backstory as smoothly- Tolkien revised it at some point.

Getting back to your point, I always want to *explain* everything. But it really does seem to work so much better if I don't.

[snitchnipped.livejournal.com]

You've got to keep them wanting more! I wrote a scene that described a character's backstory pretty much full out... but then I realized that there's no reason for the reader to have to know any of it for the plot of this story. I pulled one or two details from it, slipped it in nonchalantly here and there in other scenes, and I really hope it sets off nothing but intrigue.

The scene works, but not for another two years in my canon. It can wait!