Questions :)

Y'all had lots of great questions last week!! :) I'm going to try and answer a couple of them today!

Like you Erynn, one thing I tend to do is rewrite past scenes. So I'll have something written on the comp & have an idea of how to change a scene. I scribble down on my phone or alphasmart & then when I get to my computer I don't know where to put it? Do you leave the rewritten scene in a new file or set it just before or after that first scene in your rough draft?

Typically, I'll rewrite scenes as I'm reading back through them. Every day before I start working on the next scene in my book, I read back through what I wrote the day before. It gets me back in the voice of the character and it helps me see any mistakes I might have made.

If it's a huge chunk of writing that I'm tossing out, I'll open a new document and paste the scene that is going to be tossed over there. That way, if I change my mind, I still have the original scene.

So, I would replace the original scene in your rough draft, but be sure to save the original to a new document. Just in case. :)

I seem to have the problem of getting ideas at inopportune times & scribbling something down for later. Then when I have time to write more it seems like a lame idea. I never know what to do with that?

We suffer from the same ailment, my friend. I'm the QUEEN of lame ideas. I think I have the curse of coming up with 54 different ideas a day and I have to admit that the majority of those ideas are pretty bad.

So, what do you do with those?

By all means, save them. Write them in the same document, put them all in the same file box, or keep them as a stack of sticky notes. You never know when your idea about a 180-year-old man who is trapped in a 17-year-old body that sparkles in the sunlight and munches on freshly caught bear, who then falls in love with a 16-year-old girl will become an international bestseller. :)

Or, you might be going back through those ideas someday and realize that with a little bit of tweaking, that seemingly "lame" idea could become a really fun story. If nothing else, they'll provide lots of fun entertainment when you need a little writing-self-esteem pick-me-up someday when you've published many novels and you'll be excited to see how far your ideas have come since then.

I'll answer the rest of your questions next week! If you've got any more for us over here at Scribble Chicks, Inc. feel free to leave them in the comments! :)