Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Form and Function

Form and Function,

I might have told my readers that last weekend I won this model airplane kit. It came however minus the motor and ECM gear, like the receiver and servos. The receiver is what receives the signals from the control box on the ground and it distributes the signal to servos that go in and out and control the function of the elevator, flaps and wing ailerons.

Like many things in life I began with a zero base of knowledge on this telemetry and had no guide for ordering what I needed in the proper sizes and compatibility. Thus my first order fell short of getting me all the parts I needed.

Many writers find themselves in this same dilemma when they try and write a longer work. They start building without a real understanding of what they are doing and in some cases missing or underappreciating the importance of functional components. They just sort of start gluing and bolting stuff together and expect it to fly (float, scoot?) when they get done. They just follow their muse or intuition and hope when they finish, they will have a coherent piece of literature.

Now in a big and complex project this simply won’t work. If something is small and self-evident then maybe it will but in something big, the developer (writer) needs to have a crystal clear understanding of how all this writing is going to fit together from start to finish. In a smaller work, say something less than a chapter’s worth in length, a writer can often juggle all the pieces in their head and write something half decent. In a longer work however, regardless of how talented or intelligent the writer is, there comes a saturation point where the “Bytes” of working memory or processing are exceeded by the “Bytes” of the requirement and when this happens the whole damn thing begins to fall apart.

I think NANO is a great undertaking but only if first the author does the developmental work. This is more than a simple outline of what the story will entail but extends to a grasp of all the components and how they interrelate and feed into one another. Think of it as a wiring diagram of an automobile and you begin to see the difference between what you did for a term paper in High School and what is needed for a novel. Think of it as the componentry in a modular computer program and you get the idea for the scope of the developmental effort.

Once you do this, the huge undertaking is reduced to “Byte” sized chunks that the human mind can handle. Then the daunting task is reduced to “Baby Steps” the writer can take, that can be managed while still achieving a respectable word count with the assurance that once the fire-hose of words is over that what the writer has written has a symmetry and functionality that will otherwise be lacking.