I used to be a back porch poet with my book of rhymes.

[enamoured]

There was this meme thing going around for a while, in which you post a line from a work in progress, and here is one from what I'm writing now:

For as long as I could remember, she had always talked about her sorority with the fervor that most people talk about God, or even a favorite sports team.

All summer, I've been trying to write this story that I have had stuck in my head in various incarnations for the past three years, give or take. It all started with a roleplay game on the now-departed GreatestJournal, and in the time since I first got the idea for the story (which started off kind of as a prep school Inglorious Basterds, only without the Nazis and killing, but the revenge bit was there), it's managed to go through at least three major shifts, taking it from its original form to what I'm writing now, which is considerably more character driven.

Because of the evolution of the story (I've called it the Boarding School Epic of Doom a couple of times, so let's stick with that title), the characters have gone from being kind of... flat to actually seeming more like real people, which means that there's various little things about them that work for their characterization... but I know nothing about them. So basically, I'm having to research things. I had a chance run-in with a sorority at Borders when I was writing a chapter one day, and since one of my characters is going to be a debutante, I managed to ask them what being a deb actually entails, and they were all too happy to help me. But then there's other things, like high school basketball schedules (what would a boys' basketball team do in the off season?) and being suspended from school (circa 2004, could you get suspended from school for writing a blog that was a tongue-in-cheek op-ed type thing?) and what you theoretically can and can't get away with doing at boarding school. I like finding the answers and asking people things, but sometimes I feel so mired in wondering about the logistics that I can't write.

And that's when I start winging it, because, well, I'm gonna eventually edit this, so it's okay if there are inconsistencies and a few inaccuracies, right?

Basically: if you write, what do you do when you're writing a first draft and can't find every detail that you need? Do you tend to hold off on certain parts until you get a certain answer, or do you keep on going knowing that you'll eventually get your answer and you'll fill in the blanks later?

Comments

[queenthesixth.livejournal.com]

Doing a first draft, I tend to throw everything down on the page, even if I don't have all the answers. So some bits are very vague. Usually what happens is, I come up with a plot development that will only make more sense if something or other happens in the vague bits so I get to add a bit more detail. Or it makes me take out the vague bit altogether because to get to that development, something different has to have happened.
I can't write out of sequence. It has to be start, middle, end. I tried the other way but I just confused myself something terrible.