When you get there do you actually add them to your story? I watched a conference on youtube with Stephen King in which he kind of says that planning ahead and marking it somewhere on a notebook or something is pointless. "If the idea is good it's gonna stay with you," is what he says. I kinda agree with him, I don't know to what extant but so far it's been kind of true for me. I can't write scenes that haven't happened yet because I always end up dropping them. But I feel like I need to, if only to understand my characters better, and also to keep myself on track a bit when the story is a long one. I'm also thinking about writers like J.K Rowling, who know everything even about their side characters. Mhm, probably there's two kind of writer, or books? Anyway, I'm just wondering if that has ever worked for you guys, if you actually do this. Sorry if it's unclear, english isn't my first language. I hope I made sense.
It's not really "two kinds" so much as a spectrum from 100% Planner to 100% Pantser (writing by the seat of your pants). Though I should note that this doesn't correlate completely with writing in order or not, rather that there are writers who plan out the story ahead of time, then write it in order writers who plan out the story ahead of time, then write it out of order writers who write in order, making it up as they go writers who write out of order, making it up as they go (Keeping in mind again that this is two spectra, not two binary "yes/no"s. I myself am about 85% Planner, 75% out-of-order)
Only by mistake. I have a problem with beginnings. I write multiple of them, until I decide "this is the one"! I might use the rejected beginning later on somewhere though. Generally, I agree with Stephen King, although I don't like him that much.
I only write short quotes of what characters might say in the next chapter, but I never end up using them as they are. They are however useful for the creative process, because I start each new chapter by writing a bullet point summary of key events. Planning anything more than character arcs past the next chapter is pointless, because feedback is needed before the next chapter can be written in the right direction. If I plan for something to happen, the planned event will collide with the existing plot.
I have dozens and dozens of scenes that may or may not make it into the novel. I can't quickly count how many, because I store them in the same place that I store alternative versions of scenes and scene fragments. This is me.
I've only done it a few of times, usually when I'm super excited about a scene and can't stop thinking about it to focus on higher priority tasks. I'm a very linear writer, but I've had some scenes that simply would not stop playing like a movie on repeat until I wrote it down.
Because of my ADHD, I tend to live by a simple code: When you think of something, wait a week and, if you still remember it and think it'd be good, write it. This applies to story ideas, as well as scenes within a story. If you forget what the idea was, it's very likely that it didn't make that much of an impact on you, so it probably wasn't worth writing into the story to begin with. A bit more on topic, I never write a future scene out, but I will occasionally write the idea I had for the scene down if it passes my criteria and I want to be sure that I don't lose it. But that's just me, so feel free to ignore every word I said!
I actually have ADHD and live in actual fear of forgetting the best ideas and never finding them again, so it's really nice to hear from your point of view. If you tell me you also have ADHD but still manage to bear good ideas within you for a full week, you're giving me a bit of hope on that aspect. I don't think I can write side stories or scenes after all. I already now I'm gonna end up dropping them anyway so I barely put any effort into them. I wish I could though, I have so many ideas I just want to get to already. Anyway thanks for your input!
I used to do that, I don't so much anymore. For me, it was helpful when I was trying to find my voice in writing and learning how to write moments. I stopped because I found that it ended making me want to create moments as opposed to scenes. And the question is what's the difference? Well, a scene involves characters, settings, and plot all balled into one. If a scene is done well in a book, those things sort of melt together and create a sense of place and a sense of people occupying that space in the reader's minds. Moments, on the other hand, are all the stuff that happens in the scene. Katniss and Peta contemplating eating nightlock and dying as opposed to killing each other in the Hunger Games. Harry Potter, looking into the mirror and seeing his parents. Regan burning the Earl's eyes in King Lear. These are all moments. I realize these are all drastic examples of moments in literature. Not all moments in a story are going to carry the kind of weight that the moments I just mentioned are. But they certainly would carry no weight if the characters, setting and plot aren't working towards them. And when they work best when the moment feels organic. It's not forced, it feels like it's a part of the story. When I write out scenes I plan on putting in later, it's usually because I have one of those powerful moments in mind. Most of the time it's when the character will make an irrevocable decision. It's a moment where I want the audience to go "wow" and I feel like I have to write it. And I feel I have to write it because it has to be in there. And all of a sudden, I'm building a story around a moment and sacrificing scenes to get there.
I do this as well. Sometimes I think up a scene which won't happen for ages, or sometimes not even until a later book in the series, and I have to sketch it out for later. This is also due to the fact I have an atrocious memory.
Yep. Not so much side stories, but scenes that haven't happened yet. Absolutely. It helps me to know what's ahead, in terms of tone, character development and interaction, without doing excessive preplanning. If I envision a scene strongly, I often write it out of order. Of course it often gets changed when it gets slotted into the actual story. But it helps me stay focused on what is to come.
I am the opposite (just to voice a differing opinion here). I cannot write scenes out of order. If I do so, then I have to figure out where that scene is going to fit, without knowing what other events might occur leading up to that scene. If I write a story, I have to start from chapter 1 and work my way to the end. That's not to say that I don't plan out the plot, or think of important scenes that will happen along the way. I am 50% planner, 50% make-shit-up-er. And those scenes that I end up improvising along the way tend to come out of some sort of need. Either I need a scene to fill the space between two larger scenes, or previous events suddenly lead up to me needing another scene to follow that I never planned on. It is a bit of an organic process. In most of my stories, and especially in my current one, I have scenes and moments that have occurred that I never planned, that I never even thought would happen. And those are the kinds of scenes that have produced some of the best drama. But, it all has to be written in the order the scenes appear, so if that means I must be patient and wait until the right moment to write a scene that is filling me with excitement...then that's what I must do. I think it is the "logical" part of my brain that insists everything must be done nice and neat and in a specific order, even if it's a crummy first draft.
I totally have to do that, but for me, writing out of order is essentially mandatory, so it's the price I choose to pay. That is, I just write the scene, with the smallest of setup ("They both walked into location X, separately, because...I'll figure that out later. Oh, and he's angry about...something.") and then splice it in later.
I sometimes have to do that (writing the scenes as bare-bones as possible), knowing that, when I get to later drafts, I will delve into it and actually flesh it out. I have quite a number of scenes so far that basically act as placeholders for telling the reader that time has passed, but later I hope to make more legit scenes out of some of that material. What matters most is pushing forward so I can get the ideas I do have written onto paper before they are lost to me. And the build-up/set-up to those big scenes is important to me, hence why I have to do it all chronologically. But, yes, I 100% understand what you are talking about here!
Scenes out of order? Sure. All the time. Side stories? In a manner of speaking, yes. I wrote a whole 20k story just to get to understand a set of characters I want to use in a longer piece. Character sheets are anathema to me, static and immobile. They make no sense to me at all. I need to walk characters through some shit to understand who they are.
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Nope. I write completely in order, from "Once upon a time" until "Happily ever after." I'll come up with ideas for things that are to come (as I tend toward the planning end, at least a little), but I wait until I reach it to actually write the scene into the manuscript. My characters develop as I write, and I need to keep that development in line with the plot.
This is making me think--maybe one form of writing isn't plotter or pantser, but "iterative". Or "iterative pantser". My character changes--when I go to a different part of the novel, I have to re-read a bit, to get myself settled into who she is at that time. But when I return to each place, I'm likely to have a deeper understanding of that place, and thus a deeper understanding of what led to it and what it led to. So I may change those things. The past affects the present affects the future affects the past affects the... The same is true of the plot, though in a less subtle way. I just thought of something that should knock out several uncomfortable coincidences and instances of fuzzy motivation. I'll sweep that change through, making tiny tiny changes (because the something is something the reader won't know about until very late in the book, and I can get away with having the person who knows that secret remain indirect, even when he's the POV). Once that's done, it may point the way to some other change. In theory, it's a really inefficient way to write. But in practice, it's far more efficient, for me, than trying to plan.
In my experience, if I write a scene out of order, by the time I actually come to that place in my novel for the scene, things will have changed and I'd have to write it all over again anyway. I guess basically exactly as Chicken Freak said above me. However, I don't think writing it out of order was necessarily a waste of time simply because every time I write something with my characters in it, I get to know them better. In this respect, I'm like Wrey above - it's the only way I can get to know my characters. That doesn't mean I deliberately look to write more interesting scenes first or side stories - those usually happen because I wrote something I decided to scrap, but the intention was that I'd use it in the book lol. The only time I deliberately write "side stories" that I know are probably not going into the book is when I expand on my characters' back stories. For me, back stories are the backbone of my books, because they are what give my characters depth and explain their motivations and where they've come from, thus what their choices are and why their choices are as they are. Without their history, I find things dull and I find it hard to keep writing. I do find things that matter to you will tend to stay, so in this sense I agree with Stephen King. But sometimes there are details that really help everything click together and those are not necessarily things you will always remember. In any case, no harm in writing notes down. If you find you don't need them, well great. But if you find you do need them and don't have them, well... Bummer, huh?
Yep, except for me I write so very, very much out of order that there is no "come to that place". I write scenes and write more scenes and then sort of put them in an order, and as an order slowly gels I kind of know where I'm setting a new scene. ("This is after the Shattering." "This is when they still got along but she was in the more powerful half of that period." "This is when he's still emotionally recovering from the journey.") Now that the patchwork is assembled increasingly tightly, so that an order is essentially imposed and I can see the timeline, I'm finding the writing a bit more difficult. We'll see how I handle that.
I often concoct challenges for myself to explore various writing scenarios, like a multi-party scene consisting wholly of dialog without tags. These may become the model for scenes in other pieces of writing, or they can become a core component of a larger story not yet written. I also write scenes that may or may not appear in the final manuscript - in fact, nearly EVERY scene is subject to removal, if I deem it redundant or superfluous. A scene I am inspired to write for a part of the story I'm not yet at may be incorporated mostly intact, or with drastic modification, or not at all, for the same reasons. So I'm really not sure what the question really is. Every scene I write is tentative until it isn't. And permanence on;ly exists when a manuscript is accepted by a publisher. If then.
I'm more along the lines of @BlitzGirl - I don't write out of order. I'd say I'm 99% In-Order (I can recall going 'out of order' once so I won't knock myself to 100%) and 73% Pantser. I get lost if I don't have a 'roadmap' to follow, but the current scene I'm writing isn't on it. Just felt natural to deviate off it a little, but once I'm done with it it'll be easy for me to get right back on track. In-Order though, I agree with the 'can't write out of order because by the time I get there things will have changed'. I think that interacts with my pantsing- I may plan for a character to develop a certain way, but that's no guarantee that they will.
