hendrikboom

A friend of mine once commented that it was quite hard to get detailed information out of me about my dungeon -- back when I was into regular role-playing. He then further said that he got the impression that this was because I was afraid that the information I provided might be *wrong*. This was the most absurd thing I had heard for a long time, but it was true. I did indeed hesitate to give out information I was unsure of, details that might turn out not to be incorrect. But how, pray tell, could I be wrong about something that was wholly a figment of my imagination? Wasn't I free to make up anything at all I might choose to imagine, especially in a world where free imagining would entertain the players?

What epistemology might apply to free imaginings against which one could judge right and wrong? Consistency, sure, but in my experience, inconsistencies usually became plot points, things to investigate and see usually the points that led to new imaginations, as a crystal dislocation is the point where some crystal grows fastest. Regular is boring.

I suspect the same applies to my first-draft writing, and this leads to massive inhibition. The constraints for a written draft should be gentler than those during RPG playing, because you don't have players taking every unrevised, first-draft improvised event and effectively making it definitive by remembering it. Every detail in prose is effectively revisable (except if you're writing a serial, of course) But if I ignore the constraint of truth, if I ignore the labour of finding the facts of an imaginary situation (whatever that means) before I write it, as in the nanowrimo modus operandi, I get lots of ideas, but their assembly leads to an unsatisfying, and (so far) apparently unrevisable draft. I still haven't been able to revise last year's nanowrimo document into reasonable second-draft form (I'm not even asking for readable final form yet).

Somewhere there has to be a workable balance between ideation and polishing, but I have yet to find it on anything long.

It seems impossible to understand the characters and situations without doing trial-writings to explore them; it seems impossible to do that writing until I have a clear idea of the plot. I still have not managed a balance between world-directed and detail-directed writing. Yet such a thing is essential. How do other people deal with this?