Chapters - Writing Order
I, like most writers, have a number of ideas about my current work in progress. I know how some chapters in the story will play out almost precisely (the ending / final chapter, for example) and how some other key chapters will also play out (in the middle of the story).
I would like to know how common it is - and/or whether or not it is recommended (ideally based on personal experiences) - for writers to write chapters in a non-sequential order and then string them together at the end.
The main problem that I can see with this is linking up the plot if something should happen in the middle that hadn't been accounted for earlier in the story. However, as I have already mentioned, I have a very good idea how the main chapters will play out - the majority of the remaining chapters are mostly "filler" chapters which help progress the story but not the plot - for example, characters travelling between locations, minor conflicts, and so on.
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Agree completely with MissMonicaE. I would say so in a comment, but I have no reputation and so forth as this is my first post on a StackExchange site. In fact, I created an account specifically to comment on MissMonicaE's answer, but it turns out that I am forced to post an answer myself.
My personal experience: I had a story idea in my head for twenty-five years that I had started to write over a dozen times, and never got past the first chapter. Every time, I blew my creative load stressing about writing this part so I can write the next part. Every time, I got frustrated or lost interest, and walked away.
What finally worked was to write everything I knew about the story, separated by chapter breaks. Then I went back and wrote transitions--I don't like the word "filler" because there shouldn't be any; all of the words in your story should contribute to the story or character development. In some cases, I had to change things I had already written, but I suspect I would have had to do that anyway. In fact, my "final battle" ultimately became an epic failure and major setback to my characters, requiring more story and a new "final battle". The last 30% of my novel was unplanned, and I got two more major characters out of the endeavor, as well as the realization that a minor character wasn't so minor after all. To me, it's better to have to be creative to connect the parts that I know than it is to try to remember the parts that I know while I'm struggling to find a way to transition between them. I had great ideas about events and dialogue for later, when my characters were on an island facing off against a group of sirens, but they were still in the desert and I had no idea how they were even going to get to the island yet. I would have lost a good bit of the cool stuff if I hadn't jumped ahead to write it while I had it.
I have no doubt that if I had tried to write it in order, this last effort would have just been the nth time I tried to write that novel I always wanted to write. Doing it this way yielded a complete novel, and about 70% of the next one in the series. In the second one, I started by writing 12 chapters in the middle, the first chapter, then several chapters in between, a later chapter, and then some more at the beginning. I've almost got it all connected up, and it's working out fine for me.
In the end though, it's what works for you. Try it and see.
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I don't know a lot of writers who write out of order. But Kristine Kathryn Rusch does, and her writing is awesome wins lots of awards in multiple genres.
You will likely need some skill at gluing the pieces together, whether by writing short transitions or by writing scenes and chapters to bridge the parts you wrote earlier.
And you may have to be comfortable tossing out stuff that doesn't fit. (Which is easier if you treat it all as practice.)
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While feeling rather bad for @Ctouw, who admitted to struggle with managing out-of-order writing, I have to side with both @LaurenIpsum and @what.
Yes, you have to try it for yourself, and yes it is practically possible (I have done it, and it worked for me).
I, being a poster pantser, whose whole outline is literally one sentence, usually write in a strict chronological order--thus trying to ensure a natural progress in the story and character development--but once in a while I become suddenly overwhelmed with such clear and concise (subjectively, of course) vision of an isolated scene, I just have to pen it down in order not to forget it. I do so, and then that scene drifts from chapter to chapter, being pushed farther and farther forward by the "storyline" text, until if finds its place in the narrative and snaps snugly into it.
Sometimes I have to re-write parts of those "orphan" scenes--sometimes a little, to coordinate with the events which happened since they were written, sometimes quite a bit--but they find their places in the story and stay.
So, if I were to give advise: do it (or at least try). Every word you nail to the page makes you better at your craft. Write in any order you feel like, just be aware of the fact that you might have to re-write a lot later.
Which will also make you better at your craft :-)
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You may or may not be able to pull this off, but this is the danger you face: You may end up writing scenes that you fall in love with as scenes but which do not fit the arc of your story.
Robert McKee describes this as one of the great pitfalls of story, and of revision. The first draft of a script or a novel ends up with a few good scenes and a lot of drek. The writer then throws out the drek, keeps the good scenes, and tries again. They may write a few more good scenes, but what they end up with is a set of scenes that do not follow a coherent story arc. Because they are in love with the good individual scenes they find it very difficult to remove any of them from the story, and therefore are never able to build a coherent story arc. They end up with a collection of miscellaneous scenes and no story.
The danger of falling into this trap seems much higher if you write scenes out of order. Someone with a very disciplined vision of their story arc may be able to pull this off, but I think that no matter how much of a planner you are, you discover things in the course of the writing that change the direction of a story by some greater or lesser amount. If you have already written later scenes that you are in love with, the temptation to turn the path of the story to pass through those pre-written scenes will be very strong.
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