Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48717
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48717
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

You have an advantage that people in the moment do not have: You have all the time in the world to think it through, and you can time-travel to the past to fix anything that goes wrong.

I wrote a battle scene recently that in the book took place in the space of an hour, and my expert soldier with decades of experience planned the battle in about sixty seconds, on the spot. It took me _weeks_ to come up with that plan, drawing sketches, thinking of ways to let the severely injured guy contribute instead of being a liability, coming up with the enemy's best strategy I could think of. And the at least two weeks of work, puzzling and a dozen revisions of the plan before I even began writing, when condensed into half a page, resulted in a strategy my test readers found brilliant and entertaining, in keeping with the reputation of my character as a brilliant strategist.

But I took advantage of the fact I could go back in the book, and make changes to what had already transpired, for example to move my setting to something slightly more advantageous, e.g. near a natural barrier that wasn't there in my original draft, which my strategist knew the _enemy_ would try to use to their advantage. (And knowing how they'd move when he gave them the opportunity let him turn that into a trap.)

You can do lots of things that way, go back and invent an emergency to get rid of a character, or add a new character, or change the setting. Try to not do this for convenience, happenstance works best when it works **against** the heroes. So, for example, I can give my strategist a reason to use subterfuge by going back and _injuring_ some of his crew, now he can't use a head-on attack. I can go back in time and invent a reason they lose most of their weapons.

What you have, that your characters do not have, is all the time in the world to think about it, **and** the ability to tweak the setting, history, and setup in ways that seem innocuous, but are crucial to the strategy. So you might think,

> "This doesn't make sense, they could just retreat. So what can I put behind them, so they can't retreat? A lake? Another army? Lions or cave bears? The enemy blew up their bridge? Ah, what if I put a river back there, two chapters ago ..."

By revising the past you have made it _harder_ for them, and they **_can't_** just retreat, so it makes sense they have to go forward (or sideways).

It can take a lot of time, revisions, and puzzling to figure out a good strategy, but none of your sweat and headaches have to appear on the page. From the reader's perspective, the setting is what it is, they never saw anything else, and the strategy is the first thing that popped into your character's brilliant mind.

Other art can be like this too; in popular music many artists report hit songs that last 3 or 4 minutes took them over a year to write, to get the lyrics and rhythm and notes exactly right. An artist paints a painting in months, that you see and absorb in a few minutes. Even in food, some delicate new recipes take months to get right.

You have time.

Original score: 57