Epiphany

OMG.

Okay, I know I'm not the first writer ever to invent this. In fact, I might be one of the last to discover this method and use it. But, dang, I have just had a revelation that has blown me away.

I've been world-building over the past few weeks for a fairly complex world in which I'd like to set a trilogy (or more) of paranormals. Problem was, aspects of my world kept shifting. I'd determine to do things one way, only to second guess myself or decide that things were getting too complicated. Or I wouldn't be able to work out a particular aspect or figure out how one thing was going to work in respect to another thing, only to get all confused and forget what the original goal was in the first place. In short, it was all a big muddled mess of ideas mixed up in my brain and refusing to make any better sense when I'd put it on paper. Overwhelming was an understatement.

Yesterday morning, in the shower (naturally), I came up with the idea of having a brain dump in the form of one character asking another character any question that came into her mind. The character-in-the-know explaining down to the last detail everything the character-not-in-the-know should know. God imparting his omnipotence on the ignorant. It's the kind of scene that any writer worth their salt would cut in an instant because it's 100% infodump and 0% moving story forward.

But in putting the entire world-building into the context of a conversation, with questions and answers that could be asked and answered in some reasonable facsimile of real thought processes, I ended up with twenty pages worth of material. All of it makes sense. All of the tangles I'd had fell into perfectly logical strings that lead in perfectly logical directions. Things that I'd originally planned but that had seemed far too complicated now have become explainable, some things that I'd originally planned unnecessary and now on the mental trash heap. New ideas have surfaced, better ideas. Exciting ideas.

So, yes, it's nothing new to the writing world. This method of interviewing as a process of getting it all down and organized. And I certainly know that 99% of what I've written will be unusable in its current form and that there is no way I can afford such an indulgence as this in any real book. I plan to distill what I've written into an outline format or some such that acts as a reference, to see where I still have holes. Basically, out of the 20 pages I wrote, maybe one paragraph's worth is usable in a real book and the rest nothing more than background only important for me.

But the cost of one afternoon's worth of work is miniscule compared to what I've gained from the process.