Yora
Maester
I am at the start of a story that will probably be longer in scope and as I was getting to scene 7 I realized that the first mistery only appears in scene 10. Until that point, all scenes are only exposition.
So I was thinking about adding a little bit of tension to the scenes I've already written in a first draft and quickly got an idea to slightly spice up scene 1.
In scene 1 a parent tells a child to do a task and in scene 2 the child does the task.
In the first version the child says "sure, I got nothing else to do, how can I help?" But I think it will be more interesting by having a little bit of tension by having the child say "do I have to? I don't wanna". It's really nothing great as conflicts go, but it's something. I also think it makes scene 2 a bit more interesting by existing in a context of slight tension instead of being happy to help someone with something.
Now I went back to scene 1 to make that change, but since the story will probably run into hundreds of scenes I am not quite sure if this is a time efficient approach.
If I make the change now, it can potentially influence scenes that I have not even planned yet, so that would be a benefit.
But it's also a common, and very sensibly sounding, piece of advice to not get bogged down in minutia in the first draft and concentrate on getting new scenes and chapters written. And I think I've been at this for two months now and currently have six scenes written (five more I already cut to move the start of the story closer to the inciting incident), so getting used to keep writing regularly without fiddling on earlier scenes for many hours seems like a really good idea.
What are your personal experiences with this? How much is it worth to make relatively small changes to previous chapters that probably won't change the overall plot, before finishing the first draft? I like to have scenes build directly on what came before. But on the other hand, I probably will get additional ideas for changes as I keep going forward, which could well result in me revising scenes that I already revised before, possibly multiple times. The end product might be slightly better with that process, but is it worth the additional time load? Especially this early when I am not even writing dor publication but for practice?
So I was thinking about adding a little bit of tension to the scenes I've already written in a first draft and quickly got an idea to slightly spice up scene 1.
In scene 1 a parent tells a child to do a task and in scene 2 the child does the task.
In the first version the child says "sure, I got nothing else to do, how can I help?" But I think it will be more interesting by having a little bit of tension by having the child say "do I have to? I don't wanna". It's really nothing great as conflicts go, but it's something. I also think it makes scene 2 a bit more interesting by existing in a context of slight tension instead of being happy to help someone with something.
Now I went back to scene 1 to make that change, but since the story will probably run into hundreds of scenes I am not quite sure if this is a time efficient approach.
If I make the change now, it can potentially influence scenes that I have not even planned yet, so that would be a benefit.
But it's also a common, and very sensibly sounding, piece of advice to not get bogged down in minutia in the first draft and concentrate on getting new scenes and chapters written. And I think I've been at this for two months now and currently have six scenes written (five more I already cut to move the start of the story closer to the inciting incident), so getting used to keep writing regularly without fiddling on earlier scenes for many hours seems like a really good idea.
What are your personal experiences with this? How much is it worth to make relatively small changes to previous chapters that probably won't change the overall plot, before finishing the first draft? I like to have scenes build directly on what came before. But on the other hand, I probably will get additional ideas for changes as I keep going forward, which could well result in me revising scenes that I already revised before, possibly multiple times. The end product might be slightly better with that process, but is it worth the additional time load? Especially this early when I am not even writing dor publication but for practice?