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Q&A Writing garbage to see if the characters do something interesting?

I need a change ~ 80% of the way through my story. At the moment, I'm just throwing my characters into different combinations and seeing if they come up with anything interesting. Two of my charac...

2 answers  ·  posted 7y ago by DPT‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T07:09:59Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/30847
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar DPT‭ · 2019-12-08T07:09:59Z (almost 5 years ago)
I need a change ~ 80% of the way through my story. At the moment, I'm just throwing my characters into different combinations and seeing if they come up with anything interesting.

Two of my characters don't want to talk at all. I threw them together, and they started yelling. On the one hand I think they should yell at each other so the reader understands their history better. On the other hand, they didn't want to be standing next to each other. But I forced it.

( **Edit/update:** The argument those characters had is not in the final draft, but one scene was heavily influenced by this exercise, and I had good insight into the secondary character because of it.)

**Question: Is writing garbage (and then righting the garbage) a valid approach to creating?**

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2017-10-16T18:25:18Z (about 7 years ago)
Original score: 27