Writing segments out of sequence

[mfan2112]

Do any of you find your self writing parts of stories out of sequence where you know they will land in the overall arc?

I have been writing a longer piece, about 30k words in of what I suspect will be 75k+ in the end. But just had to jump ahead to a scene that I have not been able to get out of my head for days.

I'm hoping that by getting it on paper, I can set it aside a bit and get back to where I was and continue on. Am I the only one who does this?

 

[KeithD]

No, I don't write sections out of sequence.

 

[Blind_Justice]

Yes, it happened. In "Nikym's Predicament", I started around what is now the halfway point in my rush to get to the sex scene. When my lady love read the draft, she grinned and said: "You spent three paragraphs on the setup and so many pages on sex. I'd like to see the preceding events firsthand."

I cursed and complained and then sat down and basically wrote the "first" half of the story, wherein the protagonist sneaks into a house, steals a valuable trinket and meets said trinket's former owner. Now it's half horror story, half sexy times. And what did I get for the extra work? Jack squat.

"The Faceless Executioner" was basically written in reverse. I started with the story's climax, a masquerade and ensuing assassination and worked my way backwards, filling out the protag's backstory as I went. According to the few comments zi got, this approach resulted in an even more disjointed tale than usual.

I've tried to be strictly linear ever since, exccept for those bloody bits when my beta readers demand more details. For "Express Delivery" I had to splice in an extra 4,000 words (to an already staggering 100k draft) because my gracious extra sets of eyes demanded more and better closure. Twelve hours before a deadline.

 

[MetaBob]

Do any of you find your self writing parts of stories out of sequence where you know they will land in the overall arc?

Hell yes. My characters basically write my stories themselves once I've gotten them going. I try to not get in the way; they have much more interesting things to say about their lives than I do. All I do is wrangle them when they get too far off track, but sometimes in the writing process they want to tell details of their story that I haven't fully set up yet. I let them; I can always catch up.

 

[Rustyoznail]

I try not to, but I'm currently working on a story that's been brewing for 12 months in collaboration with another writer. Every now and then I get an idea for a piece of dialogue or a scene so I write it at the tail of the main document. I sort these notes into chronological order of the story, then delete them as I get to that part in the story.

Not ideal, but it makes sure some good ideas don't get lost.

 

[SisterJezabel]

Sometimes. I often have ideas in my head that I want to include later and will jot them down. I actually had most of the epilogue of FvR down before the rest was fleshed out more.

 

[SimonDoom]

I often do this.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Quite often.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Rarely. How can something be out of sequence when I don't have an outline? How would I know it's in the wrong place?

Although once or twice I've had the last sentence really early, and the story was the way of getting to it.

 

[shaayyne]

Do any of you find your self writing parts of stories out of sequence where you know they will land in the overall arc?

I have been writing a longer piece, about 30k words in of what I suspect will be 75k+ in the end. But just had to jump ahead to a scene that I have not been able to get out of my head for days.

I'm hoping that by getting it on paper, I can set it aside a bit and get back to where I was and continue on. Am I the only one who does this?

A story I recently finished ended up written out of sequence - though unintentionally.

The original story started off in one direction and I thought I completely knew where it was going. It ended up going in a different direction and I found myself having to back and fill in order to match the "turn" of sorts the story had.

 

[LexxRuthless]

Almost half of the stories I've written the past year and a half have been in response to specific reader requests, so I do that all the time. Usually, it is an 8-12 paragraph "scene" in an e-mail, just to see if what I have in mind matches that reader's fantasy. I then copy and paste that scene to the end of the Word document so I have it ready when I get the story to that point.

If the scene doesn't match what the reader has in mind, I toss it into my "Extracts" document instead. It wasn't what they wanted, but it could form the basis for a different story at some point in the future.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Do any of you find your self writing parts of stories out of sequence where you know they will land in the overall arc?

I have been writing a longer piece, about 30k words in of what I suspect will be 75k+ in the end. But just had to jump ahead to a scene that I have not been able to get out of my head for days.

I'm hoping that by getting it on paper, I can set it aside a bit and get back to where I was and continue on. Am I the only one who does this?

Pretty much always. I generally write the beginning, then the end and connect them. Sometimes I write rough versions of major events along the way. If I am not feeling inspiration for a particular scene I just go work on another one.

 

[Candy_Kane54]

Do any of you find your self writing parts of stories out of sequence where you know they will land in the overall arc?

I have been writing a longer piece, about 30k words in of what I suspect will be 75k+ in the end. But just had to jump ahead to a scene that I have not been able to get out of my head for days.

I'm hoping that by getting it on paper, I can set it aside a bit and get back to where I was and continue on. Am I the only one who does this?

I know where the story starts and I know how it ends. That doesn't mean that I write it from start to end. I usually plot out five or six scenes and I write them as I feel comfortable doing it. Some scenes require research and depending on how well the research goes, the scenes get written as researched. Then I stitch the scenes together to come up with the completed story.

My story arc I'm building now started in the middle. I've written stories in the arc that preceded the story I wrote first and stories that happened concurrently and after the story I wrote first.

 

[mfan2112]

Thanks everybody. I appreciate all your input.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Yep, when my characters get stuck somewhere, I just jump ahead making them do something different.

Sometimes I write the beginning and the end, then fill in the middle if the characters will let me. Sometimes I have to force them, other times they just happily go along with me.

Sometimes I'm writing different part at the same time.

But usually, I write from the start to the end. If the characters of that story don't want to work with me, I move on to another where the characters are different and more willing to go along with what I want them to do.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Pretty much always. I generally write the beginning, then the end and connect them. Sometimes I write rough versions of major events along the way. If I am not feeling inspiration for a particular scene I just go work on another one.

That about nails my method, too. Actually, I’m trying to remember ever starting at the beginning and writing straight along to the end.

I often have just the roughest idea of where the story will go. Of late, I’ve been writing ‘scene titles’ in 72 point letters, then filling in the empty spaces between them.

Bottom line? I wouldn’t worry about it. There are many ways to the top of the mountain, but everybody gets the same sunset.

 

[ChuckWolf]

I do this a lot. Often when I'm stuck somewhere in the story I'm writing, but I have some dialogue or detail I want to add before I forget.

 

[Hypoxia]

My usual method sees me write a bunch of story, review it from the top many times, and insert text where it seems appropriate. Sometime I'm inspired to write sections for insertion later in the story. But it's almost never a start-to-finish process.

 

[BelleCanzuto]

Do any of you find your self writing parts of stories out of sequence where you know they will land in the overall arc?

I have been writing a longer piece, about 30k words in of what I suspect will be 75k+ in the end. But just had to jump ahead to a scene that I have not been able to get out of my head for days.

I'm hoping that by getting it on paper, I can set it aside a bit and get back to where I was and continue on. Am I the only one who does this?

Nope.
Almost all of my longer (10k words or more) have at least one scene written out of sequence. And for the very reason you mention, a scene gets stuck in my head, playing over and over, and even if I try to ignore it, I can't get other scenes to work.

Personally, I think writing it disjointed helps me strengthen the plot or characters when I go back to knit it all together.

After I finish the whole story, I set it aside for at least a week, and if the out of order bits need work, it tends to jump out.

 

[PennameWombat]

Do any of you find your self writing parts of stories out of sequence where you know they will land in the overall arc?

I have been writing a longer piece, about 30k words in of what I suspect will be 75k+ in the end. But just had to jump ahead to a scene that I have not been able to get out of my head for days.

Not every story I write but it’s not uncommon. Especially where I have a solid beginning and a key scene in the ‘middle’ but I need connective material between the two. I’ll do these pieces then work out “so, how do I get them THERE at THAT time...” Often will see me needing to touch up the existing but it’s better than being stuck on how to do the connective piece.

On rare occasions it also results in me realising I don’t need the middle bit...

I'm hoping that by getting it on paper, I can set it aside a bit and get back to where I was and continue on. Am I the only one who does this?

Yup. And every so often I realize the idea isn’t quite right for this story. That’s how come I ended up with a detour while working on my Valentine’s Day story and just published something that with tweaks ended up entirely unrelated.

 

[NotWise]

I've written segments of a story out of sequence, but I try to avoid it.

One problem came up when the segment didn't match the story when I got there. The best way to fix the problem was to delete the part I wrote out of sequence and rewrite. Writing the segment out of sequence was a total waste of time.

The worst problem I've had came when I wrote the climactic scene of a story months before I got to it. When I got to it, I hadn't put enough effort into characterizing the male protagonist, and readers struggled a little to understand the scene. I don't think I would've ever found that problem by myself, no matter how long I let it rest before my last read. I understood my male protagonist, so I couldn't recognize the problem.

Then there are all the little glitches that come up between the pre-written segment and the story when you get there. It could be names, locations, what the characters were wearing -- any sort of detail. Those little glitches can be hard to catch, but it helps if you let the story rest before you're done with it. Even if you can catch the problems, the effort to catch them and fix them is time wasted.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I usually write sections out of sequence - often the sex scenes are the last parts. Writing later bits often helps me realise more about what needs to be told beforehand.
I stick to the maxim of writing something, anything, even tangentially related to the story, as if nothing else it should result in me knowing my characters better. Having a wad of text means I can prune it into the shape of a story.

 

[RichardWark]

I almost always write in sequence because often my stories take on lives of their own and veer left when I had planned to go right, but I have known of plenty of writers who go out of sequence. Mickey Spillane would famously write his last chapter first and then write the rest. (Actually, he started "Vengeance is Mine" with the closing line. He wrote "Juno was..." on a piece of paper and bet a friend he wouldn't be able to guess what Juno was, and went from there.) The famous novel "Gone With the Wind" was written out of order; in fact, it apparently went to the publisher without a first chapter. So it is certainly not unheard of; just not my own style.

Richard Wark
wark2002

https://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=5430653&page=submissions

 

[AllenWoody]

Although once or twice I've had the last sentence really early, and the story was the way of getting to it.

I believe J. K. Rowling wrote, or at least knew, the climactic scene of the Harry Potter series before she even started the first book.

You're in good company!

 

[Hypoxia]

I believe J. K. Rowling wrote, or at least knew, the climactic scene of the Harry Potter series before she even started the first book.

Another of my techniques: start at the end and write the rest to lead up to that. You'll be surprised how everything falls together that way. Place that ending at the beginning too -- then the story is an extended flashback.