Hi Red, how do "unplanned Big Swings" (looking at mr 12ft vertical leap) come about as a writer, and how do you deal with them?
For the way I write at least, there are two distinct phases: Creative and Mechanical.
The Creative phase is the wild, explosive one where new ideas churn and interplay until a cohesive story thread can be drawn out and locked in. Creative phase progress is mostly brainstorms. It's unbounded fun and often takes the form of me pacing around talking out loud to keep my thoughts in order, occasionally maniacally laughing and calling myself a shining golden god. 10/10 would recommend.
The Mechanical phase is turning that story thread into something anyone else can actually read. It's a lot slower. Mechanical progress includes ensuring that the new story doesn't open up plotholes in the old stuff, but for the most part it's things like top-down plotting, pacing adjustments, dialogue polish and 100% of the actual art. The Mechanical phase is more methodical and less exciting than the Creative Phase, but it's necessary to ensure the execution of the ideas actually do them justice. Art is the communication of ideas; an idea without that communication is just a fun thing to rotate in your head.
While the Mechanical phase is always deliberate, the Creative phase, being linked to such uncontrollable things as artistic inspiration, has a tendency to pop back up at random times. Unexpected Big Swings are what happens when the Creative phase pops back in unbidden in the middle of the Mechanical phase and the new chunk of storytelling it drops in my lap is more interesting than what I had planned originally.
I think it happens with such inconvenient timing in part because the Mechanical phase can be tedious. The creative mind wants stimulation, so it seeks to entertain itself with newness; and then, when faced with a choice between what I've already planned and thought through a hundred times versus a NEW wild thing, the new idea will be more sparkly and appealing. It'll also usually add some complication and convolution to a stretch of story that was initially simple. It's like, if the original plan I come up with is a straight length of string connecting two points of solid plot, the process of mechanically traversing that string to make it into a finalized comic allows me to notice points where it'd look a lot better if I tangled that string up.
That doesn't always mean the new idea is better than the original plan! Great ideas still need to work in the mechanial execution before they become good stories, and sometimes a great idea would be too much of a big swing and destabilize the rest of the already-constructed narrative. It's important to test the new idea in the context of the rest of the already-solidly-woven plan.
In this case, I can't much detail without spoiling the rest of the chapter, but part of the reason why I went with this Big Swing when it occurred to me is that it actually let me tie up a few other plot threads more elegantly than I had originally planned. What was initially a series of events happening in sequence got braided together into a causal chain. The benefits of tangling things up is it lets you tie together a lot of disparate things.
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