Writing yourself into a corner.

[BearBear]

The last time for me was bullying and it took me a few days and discussions with friends to work a valid way out of it. This was tough but very fun and memorable so I often try to write myself into an impossible corner just to have fun figuring it out.

 

[pmmg]

By strategy, I just write myself ahead, and let it lie where it lies. It seems impossible at times, but I trust I can work it out when it does.

ATM, I am facing impossible travel times. I am not sure how I will account for it...yet... I'm also looking at a very unlikely desert area on my map and wondering it I can keep it out not, something for which I doubt any reader will care, but I know means the world would have to rotate the other way for it to form.... Hmmmm... As a last, I have a name for the moon in one of my cultures, which has been used prevalently throughout, but other cultures would have different names, and too many names seems confusing. I am leaving the sorting of that our for the rewrite.

As Alice would say, I can believe six impossible things before breakfast--I just have to work them out before its finished.

 

[ThinkerX]

Way back, I used to take an idea and start tapping away at it - and more often than not, would write myself into a corner.

These days, I don't begin a tale without a fairly solid idea of the beginning, middle, and end.

Outlines help immensely with longer works.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Some of the funnest bits are getting characters out of corners in believable and creative ways. It's easy to get a character out of a corner when you're god, it's trickier to keep the character believing they're really that talented and clever, heh heh.

 

[skip.knox]

I don't write into or out of corners. That sort of implies I thought I knew where I was going and then somehow surprised myself because it turns out I didn't actually know what i was writing.

What does happen--far too often--is that I can see a problem on the horizon. That starts to nag at me, even though it might be several chapters ahead yet. I work on it until I get it resolved and *then* I write it. For example, in one book I had a Roman legion pursued across the Danube River. Now, you don't get several thousand people over a wide river all in one go. That means there's a point where some are on the left bank, some on the right. This in turn means at some point one side is going to be utterly overwhelmed by the enemy.

I toyed with letting that happen. A heroic stand to save the others. But that would mean getting the general, and one of my MCs, to safety, deliberately leaving the others to die a horrible death (goblins). It just felt wrong. I tried a dozen approaches and none of them worked.

The solution was to do a fake. Our heroes did something a few days earlier that forced the goblin army to take the long way around a lake, giving the legion time to cross the river. This worked well. It let my MCs do heroic fighting at the lake, and let the crossing still be in peril because if they took too long the goblins would catch up to them again.

I admit that sometimes the "planning" involves (as it did in this case) actually writing out scenarios hoping to see if I could make them work. Sometimes, only by failing at the chapter do I know for sure it isn't going to work. It's a major contributor to my writing formula that every book is actually a book-and-a-half. <grimace>

 

[Demesnedenoir]

For me, the corner is the place where all the bad things happening gets a character into such a pickle that it isn't obvious how they're going to get out. This doesn't happen often and it's semi-intentional as I add "tough spots" on the fly quite a bit. I just assume I can figure a way out that makes sense in most cases. I did have to kill one concept—before it was written—because there just wasn't a way out of it without the hand of god showing itself, heh heh.

 

[Mad Swede]

I don't think I've ever written myself into a corner as an author. My characters have got themselves into some failry tough spots, but that's a deliberate part of the story and I don't put the characters into those sorts of situations unless I can have the characters get out in a way which is plausible. To me that's part of thinking the story through before I write it down.

 

[BearBear]

In my original thinking, it doesn't matter if the impossible situation was planned or not, I believe it's one of the funnest parts of writing. I see it again and again in my favorite books and stories, so it must be common.

I think some took the question as a setup for failure and re-write and I didn't mean it that way, so now that I think about it, my original thinking was self-answering, but I truly appreciate the posts herein that helped me realize that.

 

[skip.knox]

It can appear impossible to the reader. That's fine.
It can appear impossible to the characters. That's deliberate.
If it appears impossible to me as the author, even after I've tried my best to resolve the problem, then it doesn't go into the book.