History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Braindumping As Pre-Writing?

| October 3, 2022

Sometimes when I’m starting a story, I have a very clear picture of what it will look like. But other times, I have vague ideas and I need to do a bit of brainstorming in order to get to a point where I can start writing the story. In some cases, this involves braindumping, too. […]

If At First You Don’t Succeed …

| January 28, 2019

In recent weeks, I’ve had a couple different stories that I’ve started writing, and then realized that I was approaching it the wrong way. Either the plot was going off the rails, or it was too close to something else, or it just wouldn’t really get to the meat of the plot in any sensible […]

Writing Scenes to Cut Them

| November 20, 2017

Recently, I started working on a new story, and wrote what I originally thought would be the first scene of that story. As I worked on it, though, I realized that while something momentous was happening, it wasn’t the momentous thing that the story was going to need. But I kept writing it anyway, because […]