So here I am. I’ve handed in The Outcast Chronicles and I’m 100 pages into the new trilogy. There’s that wonderful sense of … anything could happen!   … if only I could get some concentrated time to work on the book. Seriously, I’d like to run away somewhere quiet, where I can just write and do nothing else.

But since I can’t, I find myself thinking about the characters and their problems, when I’d much rather be writing which means I’ve been giving the trilogy a lot more thought than usual, rather than just plunging in.

I came across this post on starting. Act First, Explain later. (It is romance blog but apart from number 11, the rest of the tips are true for any story). It’s funny, but the more I teach about writing movie treatments and scripts, the more I analyse writing books. One of the tips is get into a scene as quickly as possible and get out again.

This leads to this post I found Eight Lessons every Writer can learn from the Sound of Music.

Because we all know the story of the singing nun, it’s easy to understand the points the author is making. And the very first point is, the story begins after the beginning. The character is already ripe for conflict.

Today I watched the first 30 minutes of two movies with the students, looking at how the story-world was set up, the characters were introduced along with their conflict and how the protagonists made that step over the threshold from the first act to the second act.  It made me realise how well crafted these movies were.

The first movie was Men in Black. It’s a few years old now, but it still stands up well. There is not a wasted line of dialogue. The timing and editing is great. I think this comes from the story being told as a comic book first. Comic writing must be really tight.

The second movie was Shaun of the Dead. They must have workshopped the script over and over. It is layered with resonance, foreshadowing what is going to happen. The characterisation is brilliant.  When something is done really well, it looks effortless.

All this makes me want to take another look at my opening chapters, while keeping in mind something Sarah said the other day about over polishing until you take the natural zing out of your work. So here I am torn, betwen polishing and plunging into the story.

I think I’ll plunge in and not go back to the beginning until I have a couple of hundred pages under my belt. Then I’ll be able to do the subtle foreshadowing because I’ll know what’s coming.

Are you the sort  of writer who can plunge in and write, trusting to intinct, or do you plan and plot before you put a single word down?