Should I start writing even if I'm not sure how the story will end?
I'm writing (planning to write) a fantasy novel. I'm done with the worldbuilding, rules of magic, main characters (even though I think I will add some more in the future) and their initial plots and interactions. The problem is that I don't have a clear idea of what's gonna happen in the middle/end of the story. I only have vague ideas.
Should I first complete the storyline (at least the main events) and then start writing or should I start to write and see how my characters behave as I write?
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You don't have to know how it ends, but you do have to know how it begins. It begins with some pain, some longing, some need, some disturbance in the equanimity of life that forces some deep deviation from the ordinary course of affairs.
You don't have to know how the deviation will end, or even what course it will take, but you have to know what it is and why it is. You cannot meander along waiting to discover it or waiting for it to happen of its own accord. Or rather, you can, but nothing worth keeping gets written till you find it.
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Lots of writers start writing with no idea where it will go, much less how it will end. Dean Wesley Smith has a book about that, called Writing Into the Dark.
On the other hand, I once heard Richard North Patterson claim that "Any mystery writer who starts without knowing the end is committing authorial malpractice." (The next time I read one of his books, I knew the ending about 25% of the way in. And the one after that, I figured out on page 8. So go figure.)
If you have some way of progressively moving in the direction of a climax, that will help. You don't even have to know the climax. You just have to know that you are moving toward one.
A pretty good way to do that: Start with a character with a problem. Then write try/fail cycles. The character tries the smartest thing they can think of. But it fails. Not only that, it leaves things worse than they were before. So they try the next thing, which is more difficult in some way.
This progresses (more or less) in the direction of a climax because eventually the character runs out of easy ideas, and has to try harder ones, or ones they are more and more reluctant to try.
If you keep that up, you get to a point where the only way forward is to do something the character has sworn all along that they would never do. And you have discovered a climax.
My advice: Whichever way gets you writing is the right way (for now).
Even if you end up throwing stuff out, everything you write is practice. It's learning. That's worth a lot.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/23482. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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