Is writing in fragments bad practice?
Occasionally, it feels easier to write individual scenes of a prose and later connect them somehow.
Does this method have any significant benefit and/or throwback over the regular "perpetual" way?
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In Story, Robert McKee warns very strongly about the dangers of writing in scenes. His point is that what makes a story is its overall arc. Given a set of characters you have invented, each with a particular motivation and a set of values that shape how they pursue their goals, it is easy to put almost any combination of those characters in a room together and allow them to interact. That will create a scene (in both meanings of the word) and if you are a good writer and you have imagined your characters well, it may be a very good scene that reveals interesting things to the reader. But that does not mean that it does anything to advance the overall arc of the story.
A collection of individually great scenes that do not work together to create a satisfying story arc do not make for a compelling story. To make the overall story work, you will have to cut some scenes, modify others, and create some new ones. The danger McKee argues (and as a Hollywood story doctor, he has seen writers go through this pattern) is that the writer has certain scenes (their darlings) that they are particularly fond of. Those scenes, the writer decides, have to stay in. And so the writer writes some new scenes, but the purpose of those scenes is to steer the plot to those darling scenes that they can't part with.
This does not produce a satisfying story arc. In fact, it often makes the problem worse, because every new scene that is created in each rewrite has the potential to be a really great scene and to become yet another darling through which the writer feels compelled to steer the plot, thus making the story line more and more convoluted with each iteration.
To avoid this trap, McKee would argue, you must think in terms of your overall story arc. Where is this story going and what it the best way to take it there? Write the scenes that the story needs to get where it is going. Otherwise, prepare to ruthlessly slay your darlings.
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No-one can answer that for you but you, do you find that the end result justifies the practice? I can't write in fragments because they either A. don't fit when I come to stitch the whole together, usually because of incompatibilities of style, and I have to start again or B. they take on a life of their own and turn into new and different stories that may or may not relate to the original intention. But that's me that may not hold true for you, just like I can sit down and write thousands of words in a couple of hours but only once every couple of months, I have to seize on my inspirational periods when I can where a lot of people I know can sit down and write every day.
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I think it's ok for the basic outlining phase and for the first couple of drafts, just to get your ideas down. If you lose momentum on a particular scene/chapter/whatever terminology you're using but do still have ideas on a different one, then in my view it's better to switch to that part you do want to write rather than try to force something out for the part you don't, or lose all motivation to write altogether. If it means you don't lose momentum then by all means switch from a scene you're not enjoying writing to one you want to write.
Having said that, if you keep doing that then you're going to end up with disjointed scenes, especially if you go back and write an earlier scene after writing a later one. You'll end up with later scenes that fail to make reference to earlier ones where it would be logical to do so, and then you're bound to get a disjointed mess.
Worse, if you keep putting off writing scenes you're not enjoying and adding new scenes instead you might never finish those scenes off at all. If they're pivotal to your story then that's very bad! While it's unlikely that the things that your story hinges on are also the things you're not going to have much fun writing it's a possibility.
For that reason I feel it's only a good idea to employ scene switching early in the process. Write what you want to write for the first draft and not worry about the order your write things in. Then you've got the basic story points you want to hit fleshed out, stop, read everything you've written from beginning to end, and write notes on how it gels (or more likely fails to gel) as a story. Use the knowledge gained for your later drafts, try to stick to a more linear story writing style and tie the individual scenes you've written together more tightly.
At least that's how I've been working. As with most other things when it comes to creativity it's all down to what you find works best for you personally. I've found that for me personally, once momentum is lost it's very difficult to get it back and all you end up with is another abandoned draft.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29360. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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