Choreography versus winging it.

I turned out a chapter’s worth of words today before my hands started hurting. To give my hands some time off, I did some work around the house, packed up some orders and prepped some things for Christmas. It was a light day for physical activity, at least until the evening. I went dancing and was, by and large, in motion for two and a half hours.

The dance outings break neatly into two parts. First you have the lesson, in which the instructor shows us all the moves we’re going to learn and then has us repeat them over and over with a variety of partners. The lesson is really choreography because both partners know exactly what moves are going to come in what order. When we do the lesson right, we capture the essence and feel of the move, making it familiar and easy to do.

The second half of dancing is a free-for-all. Half the time I ask women to dance, half the time they ask me. As a lead (as opposed to a follow), I have to figure out what moves we’re going to do, and I pretty much do it on the fly. I think a move or two ahead, and sometimes will toss in the little routines we learned in the class. Generally, however, I put together moves that feel right, depending on the song tempo, my partner’s skill, conditions on the floor and whether or not I have an audience. If I have a good song, a good partner, and folks are watching, I’ll do lots of fun, flashy stuff. (A good lead makes the woman he’s dancing with feel as if she is the belle of the ball while he’s dancing with her.)

The work I did on the book today was more winging it than choreography. A week or so ago when I put together a vague outline of the ending of the book, I broke things out into chapters. I lined up the things that I thought would be exciting, working with the sequence of chapters I have rotating through the last third of the book. When I choreographed the ending, it seemed like a good string of events.

But now that I’m doing the actual writing, I needed to make changes. One side benefit of the adjustments I made this morning is that I chopped out about 4,000 words. Why? Well, I really didn’t know what those words would be, and it works out that in this little section, going leaner and meaner is better. This is some serious action to tie things up, so I can save on ruminations and just go with action. The reactions can come in later, when I have more space and characters have a chance to think as opposed to act.

Nothing worse, after all, than to interrupt a battle scene with a character thinking back on an incident from childhood and the ramifications thereof while he’s shoving eighteen inches of steel through someone’s guts.

What changing things on the fly does is make the story a lot tighter and brings it to a sharper climax. It’ll take me the next couple days to get through all that action, then I need to line out and organize the chapters which tie things up and put this novel to bed, while hinting at things that will come in the future work in this world. This deviation from, or adjustment of, the outline is a very good thing because the changes are made in keeping with the demands of the story. We’ve built to this climax, so going straight for the throat is definitely the way to go.

Now all I need to do is ice down my knee from dancing, get a good night’s sleep, and see how many more words I can string together tomorrow.