What I'm trying not to do

When I plan a story, I tend to get bogged down in the details. I panic if I don't know things like the names and ages of all the characters, their hair and eye colors, their backgrounds, their jobs, the kinds of cars they drive, where they live, whether they like Chinese food or Italian, if they favor their right or left hands... You get the picture. Often, by the time I've sorted out the details and sat down to write the story, I discover that I'm frustrated or bored or no longer interested in pursuing the idea. I've set aside quite a few projects because I'd allowed myself to get so wrapped up in the small things that I completely lost my desire to write the story; my inner perfectionist had taken all the fun out of the process, egged on by my inner critic and my inner procrastinator, both of whom tend to work hand in hand to keep me from writing.

Now, details are important, there's no doubt about that, but I don't feel they're as important in a first draft--despite what my nefarious inner mob would have me believe. So with my current project, my plan is not to plan. I mentioned in a previous post that I have the beginning of my story, know what happens through much of the middle, and have an idea where I want it to end. That's it--and that's considerably less than what I usually have at this point in the process. I'm not even entirely sure right now what my main character's name will be. I have an idea of course, and also a vague notion of what she'll look like, but I've decided not to let myself stress about having every little detail set in stone before I begin writing. I'm not even going to outline this time, which is something I normally do. This project will be an experiment in which I attempt to free my mind and write organically, to just let the story spill out as it wants to rather than force it into being what it's not. It's the first draft, and first drafts can always be fixed; telling the story is the most important part at this stage in the process. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens.

What's your writing process? How do you handle the details?

Day gone wrong

My husband has been working on a project at his office all day, and although the kids and I had a good day together, we had a horrible evening. All the ambitions I had to write are gone, and I'm sitting here at the computer with a glass of wine (actually, my second) and a plate that once held graham crackers and peanut butter. (We're out of chocolate.) I had some good things happen writing-wise earlier in the day, and I wanted to write about them here tonight, but the bad Mom evening I just had has taken my excitement away. Tomorrow will be better, right? Meanwhile, here's a bit of writing I posted at another site this morning. Although fictional, it describes how I feel about my current stage in the writing process:

The beginning was always the hardest. Oscar would spend days on it, searching for the best words to recreate the images that played in his imagination. Translating stories to paper was difficult; describing exactly what he saw in his mind did not happen easily, and characters who moved freely in his imagination would sometimes become stilted and two-dimensional on the page. For him, the beginning of the story was the story, and if he could get it just right--give those characters depth and breath and life--then he knew the rest of the story would follow.