“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” -John Wooden

If only I had done things right the first time around.

In the time I’ve been writing fiction, I’ve oscillated between tightly planning out what I’m going to write and just winging it as I go. I’m still not sure what the right way is. If I plan things out I can keep the story more consistent, but I lessen the chance of coming up with something even more amazing in the moment, and it’s not as fun when I’m writing. If I just wing it though, inconsistencies appear, and it’s not as much fun when I’m editing and have to go back and fix them.

As I edit right now, I wish I had planned things out more. Once again I’ve hit a snag, and there are major rewrites ahead, because I didn’t think things through well enough when I first wrote these scenes. Crap.

Probably the right answer is a mixture of the two – plan out the major parts, wing the details, and then go back and see if what’s on the page is consistent and works. In this case, it’s because I didn’t do step #3.

So now I’ve got rewrites to do, and that deadline hasn’t moved. Back to work.