I’ve been doing some serious rewriting and I’ve been focusing on what things slow us down when we write, and it got me thinking about painting. If you’ve ever seen a person paint, they will often start with just colors over broad areas which is known as blocking. Take this concept, and drop it into writing (or rewriting) a scene.
What I have found is for me, it’s easy to get trapped in the minutia, finding the perfect word, sequencing the perfect events, but often, you’re so zoomed in that you might be complicating things for yourself without considering the overall flow of the scene. Does it move too fast, too slow, too much telling, too much showing, etc. When you are so zoomed in as you are when you are writing, it can be difficult to feel the natural flow. Now, this isn’t to say if you are inspired by a part to dig in because you have great ideas you shouldn’t. NEVER stop inspiration as it is flowing! But instead, this is for the parts where you are trapped. The world building is off, or you feel like it’s too long. Or a sequence of actions is annoying you. Instead of having to get it perfectly right, just go with what flows out of you at that time. Maybe something that happens later will inform the earlier part. But even if it doesn’t, once you finish the scene, you can go back through from the start and read it real time, THEN you can iterate on those sections because chances are, in the moment at the speed of consumption, what is missing will fit right in.
Why I find this important is it is easy to get too bogged down with getting REALLY long in a section of a scene, and then you find out later you spent all this time for something you end up cutting. This way, you now have the whole scene blocked out and you can see if you need to push in or pull out in what you have. I think utilizing this can help you make progress when you might feel you are stalling due to not being able to figure out your line level brainstorming.