Goosing The Descriptions

We talked recently about inadequate preparation leading to deficient descriptive language in the text. Today we examine how sometimes it’s good to avoid getting too detailed too early on.

In the universe of the Science Novels, there’s a thing we’ve nicknamed the Swap-O-Matic. There’s only one, but it turns up several times. And each time it appears, the description is different. Way different. Horrendously deviant. (There’s also another machine that’s similarly chameleonic, but in subtler ways.) You see, there are two of us writing, and we each think we have the “right” image in our heads. Furthermore, over months of writing, our respective mental images have shifted.

And, over the evolution of these manuscripts, the ways we need the machine to behave have also evolved. Now that the end is in sight on the first drafts, we are finally pretty confident that we fully understand this thing’s job. So, now we can reconcile all the comically inconsistent depictions. Essentially, we’ll reverse engineer the Swap-O-Matic.

A couple of weeks ago, we said the goose wrench is usually employed early, to tune up the outline. And for plot-level stuff, that’s true. If the plot has sections that flap in the breeze, we’re not ready to tell the story. It has to be more stable, at least for us. But on a small scale, as in the case of describing a particular apparatus, it can be better to leave things loosey-goosey until late in the game. Had we created an exquisite, authoritative picture of the Swap-O-Matic before we started writing prose — before we knew what all we’d be asking of it — we would have been designing the wrong machine.

Working with a partner creates more chances for inconsistencies, but in the first draft that’s not so bad. It just means more ideas from which you can cherry-pick the best details during revision when you make everything line up.