Part two of answer: I tend to rewrite as I go - I find it actually difficult to go on unless I'm happy with what's preceded, so I keep tinkering until I'm happy. Even when I do go on, when I start in the morning I go back ten pages and do more fixing. I also do any fixing if my muse has probs, then, once I'm done, I go back and smooth out all sorts of things. By the time I'm ready to actually print the thing out, it's a fifth draft.
Then I give it to my handy-dandy editor-types, and do all their fixes.
With film scripts, I'm more like Pogue - for those, I really do have to know where it's going, because it's a much more constricted form - same with plays.
For the Kritzer books, I had no idea what the actual "story" of the three books was going to be. For the first book, that didn't come to me until page forty-six, when I wrote the real-life version of the Susan story. But, when I looked at it the next day I said, "Ah, that's the story of this book" so I moved it and began part two with it. And that became the formula for the three Kritzer books. The color, world, characters and set up in Part One, the story in Part Two. Interestingly (for me at least), I didn't even know if books two and three would have a story - I thought the life was interesting enough. The fact is, I had, in the back of my head, the inkling that I could tell the story of Benjamin's friend, and I had the same inkling about Samantha in the third book - but I didn't want to go there. I really fought it in both books, but that's where I was led and that's what I did. Had I outlined, I just don't think they would be the same books at all.
In terms of the two books that followed, again lots and lots of notes. What I did with both books when writing them is unconventional, but again, I prefer it. I didn't know who was going to die in Writer's Block until I was a third of the way through. But, I knew the two major twists going in, and I pretty much knew who was going to be the killer, although I left that open until I was half-way through. Who should die became obvious to me as I was writing it - it didn't become something arbitrary that I just decided early on. I set the scene and let the characters take me where they took me. That's what jazzes me and that's probably the way I'll always do it. In the new book, lots of notes, but I did know everything that would happen (although not necessarily how it would happen) going in. I knew the layout of the book going in.
