The Writer’s Bandaid
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Writing Bandaids
Assuming, of course, that you CARE when you hit a plot hole or realize you’ve been chasing plotbunnies down dangerous and useless tangles of tunnels, I have a tool that may save you a great deal of agony and effort.
I present to you, the mighty square bracket! [ ]
Just above and to the left of the enter key on the standard keyboard, the square bracket’s power as a writing tool cannot be denied.
The square bracket is the writer’s bandaid.
Regardless of whether your book has a skinned knee or it’s missing a heart and one of its lungs, the square bracket bandaid will allow you to keep producing instead of faceplanting into the brick wall of Realizing You Screwed Something Up.
Using The Bandaid
Using the bandaid is simple.
Example 1 [BANDAID : Self, from now on, write as though Suzie has GREEN eyes.]
Example 2 [BANDAID : That was useless. Cut that whole scene. Continuing on from the point where Gerald sneezed and set fire to Suzie's birthday cake.]
Example 3 [BANDAID : Self, come back and write the scene where Suzie realizes Gerald is a dragon, and Gerald explains the history of dragonkind. I don't want to write it right now.]
The brackets set it apart from normal text. The word “BANDAID” (okay, for me, the word is “MUFFIN” but it doesn’t really matter what you use) is a search tool. When you pin “THE END” on your manuscript’s tail, you can do a search for “[BANDAID” and find every time that you used the tool, then go in and fix things or fill in the gaps or cut out extra stuff.
Even when you are NOT doing NaNoWriMo’s frenetic pace, continually stopping to edit your book is productivity DEATH. The eye color thing seems like a silly, frivolous example, doesn’t it?
It’s not. Write the note and KEEP MOVING FORWARD.
That’s what NaNoWriMo’s all about, after all. There’s a lot of coffee and good-natured insanity to distract you from the underlying moral, but the basic lesson of NaNo remains important even if you take years to write a book.
Example 1
Sure, you could go back and fix Suzie’s eye color now, but you’d have to STOP EVERYTHING and throw it in reverse to do it. Even if it only takes ten minutes with find/replace, you’re still shifting gears. (Remember that post about gas mileage? Now I’m kind of wishing I’d tied it in to writing).
An example of that in my last NaNoWriMo is when I realized that a scene was taking WAY TOO LONG. I knew where it needed to go and roughly how it needed to get there, but the conversation with the stone toad rambled unforgivably. I applied my bandaid and continued writing as if the main character had already been transformed into a pigeon.
Another example of why not to fix things right away is from my first NaNoWriMo. I arbitrarily changed the MC’s eye color partway through…and then at the VERY END (we’re talking word 49,500 here) I realized (like BOOM! crash of lightning realized) that the MC needed to have one brown eye and one green eye. And she needed to wear an eye patch over the green one most of the time because THAT was the eye through which she saw magic things.
Had I taken time to change the eye color after the original swap, I’d have then had to RE-DO that same work when I altered it for the two-color thing.
Example 2
Don’t delete crap half-scenes. You never know when that might be useful and you never know what the rest of the book will REALLY look like until it’s written. Your muse chased a plotbunny down a rabbit hole and it took you strange places, but don’t assume that NOW, when you’re frustrated and grumpy, is the best time to decide that you should set fire to it.
Undo is a magical thing, but it can only do so much. Delete is forever. Let your rough draft be ugly. You might want that scene later.
In my first NaNoWriMo, I wrote an entire scene where the main character convinced a clauricane (call it an Irish fairy if you don’t know what it is) to leave a bar, thus helping the business owner immeasurably but ruining her date. Halfway through the scene, I realized that although it was FUN, it wasn’t moving the story forward and it would have to go. That half scene totally still counted towards my NaNoWriMo wordcount, though.
Example 3
The last example isn’t one that I personally use very often. I write in a very orderly fashion, from start to finish, scene to scene. I also assume that if I don’t want to write something because it sounds boring then I probably wouldn’t want to READ it, either.
I either force myself to write it (usually gaining a few fun tidbits I can use later in the book) or I find some other way to accomplish that goal. Either way, I find a skipped scene to be VERY DIFFICULT to fix in revision because the bracing scenes (before and after) dictate what ABSOLUTELY HAS TO BE IN THAT SCENE.
Even as a diehard fan of outlining, I don’t like that kind of restriction. If I write the scene and my muse decides it would be made more interesting if we learn that the Suzie is actually a descendant of George the Dragon Slayer, then I either have to rewrite most of the book or deny myself the fun of writing that tidbit.
HOWEVER, just because I don’t do it, that hardly means that it’s not a great use for the square bracket bandaid.
If you are STUCK, use every single tool at your disposal to get UNSTUCK.
PERIOD.
If bandaiding past a scene allows you to Keep Moving Forward, then DO IT and don’t look back.
If your revision pass has you cursing each and every one of your scene-bridging bandaids, maybe you write like I do, and you shouldn’t use this tool for that purpose.
Keep Moving Forward
I’ve said it (and capitalized it) often enough that I hope you realize how important it is.
(Love the movie Meet the Robinsons – if you haven’t see it, I highly recommend it. Yes, it’s a 3D animated film. If that made you curl your lip a little, I condemn you to live in that skull forever.)
Fill your writer’s toolbox with useful tools and bring them out when you need them.
Good luck to those of you NaNoing. This is a tool I created (or borrowed, I can’t quite remember) during NaNoWriMo, and it’s one I fully intend to whip out on “srsbsns” books when I write those, too.
Questions For The Mechanic
Not that I consider myself an expert, but I have fixed my fair share of clunkers – and better yet, the readers of my blog are some of the kindest and savviest folks I know.
Running into a brick wall in your writing? Have a question?
Ask in the comments, and we’ll see if we can help.
Similarly – writers! What are some of your favorite writing tools?
I’m pretty sure I wish I’d known about this last year. :)
. . . or maybe not. I’m afraid I might have had one huge [BANDAID: This really sucks; fix later], with the open bracket 50K words in front of the close bracket. ;)
Seriously, I do wish I’d known this before: even when writing my unicorn story, I think it would have helped me finish the rewrite, certainly, a lot more quickly!
For the rest of you: This is good stuff. Learn it, use it, love it.
Steve Hall´s last post ..National Punctuation Day: The Mechanics of Writing Dialogue
*laughs* I’ve READ this NaNo novel of yours, and it most definitely does not suck.
So glad the tool is resonating with you, though!!
Can I pat myself on the back for inspiring you to write this post?
Tami graciously introduced this tool to me when I sent her a frantic e-mail about my productivity grinding to a halt due to a plot hole (chasm)!
Yes, I panicked a whole 4 days into NaNo! Stop laughing!
Anyway, this is a great tool – thanks again Tami!
willydd3´s last post ..Shifting Priorities–Chapter One
You can totally pat yourself on the back. *grin*
That email was absolutely what inspired the blog post! <3
I’ve been doing this already, but the idea of putting “bandaid” or “muffin” or whatever so you can search for it is brilliant! Definitely adopting.
Faith´s last post ..NaNo 2011 Day … 7? Also, more books!
Ugh. I forgot to add the key phrase in my last project. BIG mistake. *headache*
Ouch, I can imagine. Glad you posted this and hopefully I can avoid *those* kinds of headaches, at least…
Very nice post love.
For one of the BANDAIDs (not sure if it more accounts to 2 or 3), did you think about the prospect of leaving yourself a note for something you know you want to happen in the story but just don’t quite have a feel for it at the time?
I include #3 in this because it fits very nicely I think. “Suzie realizes Gerald is a dragon” could be a point in the story that needs to happen and from the note you can write as though it did happen, but the WAY it happened could be the kind of thing that does not necessarily change the way the story plays out. It can still be a needed scene in showing the depth of character of Suzie or the background of Gerald, and not have the same sort of effect on the story another scene might have.
Ex: Al gets his finger cut off, might have needed to happen but HOW did not matter so much. Al consoling Dan because of Adams effects the way all three characters act around one another and thus the scene has a dramatic effect on the story as it continues.
Yosh?
*nod* Normally, I don’t know ahead of time which scenes are more important than others though, so it’s hard for me to pre-judge bandaids that way.
Ah true enough, assuming a scene would not be effective might be setting yourself up for a lot of work in the long run.
I don’t use it the same way. I use parenthesis with all capitals. Then when I read through it without editing the first time I find all the places where I need bandaids, not just the ones I saw as I was writing.
And that’s before I get down to the nitty gritty.
I never thought of putting the word “Bandaid” in there so I could search it later. *Scribbles note to self* Thank you.
However, I write like you do to. If I skip something it’s nigh impossible for me to go back and fix it later. I have to write the story in order.
Casi´s last post ..Whistleblower, Part I
Ah, the first revision pass. When you realize just how much of your story remained in your head instead of actually making it down to the paper.
Humbling, really.
Also, yay! I think you’re the first writer who has admitted to writing the same way as me! *grins and fistbumps*
Since I use Microsoft Word for most of my writing (which still isn’t fiction, btw), I prefer the “add comment” feature instead of brackets. It moves the comment into the margin, highlights it, and gives it a color. The biggest part that I like is that it doesn’t “mess up” any of my text. So, I won’t accidentally include bracketed text that I forget about.
That said, I tend to use double-brackets when I’m not using word, preferable bold and with extra line breaks around the area. I like for it to really stand out and be easy to find using a plain text search.
brad-o´s last post ..Baby Advice from a Neophyte Father
Comments are fantastic. I prefer those for when I’m getting edits and critiques – no change within the text itself, but very obvious pointers to where something tripped someone up.
I consider it my comments on my own work. ;)
I have given myself permission to band-aid this time. Except I think I will call it FLAIL. I haven’t had to yet, though.
*grin* Love it, “Flail”
<3