Writing out of sequence: a practical mid-book post

[mrissa]

Some of you have expressed curiosity about the process of writing a book out of its chronological order, so I figured I'd put some of the nuts and bolts down here. For those of you who don't care, the short version is: book good now, cold dead fish soon. (scottjames: happy!)

At more length, then:

At some point in each book, I end up writing down an unfinished chapter list and roughly what's going on in that chapter but hasn't been written. I am generally an "incredible disappearing outline" sort of person, so I start books with a file that has something like:

"Chapter 1
A meets B; A bashes B's head with a stick
Chapter 2
B wakes up angry
Chapter 3
C feeds them apples"

And then I write merrily away, and it will look like this:

"Chapter 1
A meets B; A bashes B's head with a stick
Chapter 2
B awoke in a featureless white room. Her head ached fiercely. "All right!" she shouted in her fierce but achy way. "Who has bashed my head with a stick? Was it you, A?"
"It was only for your own good," said A. "And anyway the brain damage should be minimal."
Chapter 3
C feeds them apples"

This is all very well at first. But as of this morning I had 51K of book, with all of some chapters written and some of most chapters written and none of Chapter 28 written. And scrolling through 51K to see where the gaps go and what has to be written yet has its benefits, and sometimes it's exactly the thing to do, because I will see where I can pound more cool in with a mallet.

But it's good to have options other than scrolling through all 51K and/or only writing the bits nearest the last bit I wrote. So I went through and wrote -- longhand -- a list of unfinished chapters and one or two words about what needs to go in each, so it looks like this:
"9 -- opera
[10]
15 -- fight with king
17 -- noble assassination"
and so on. Exactly like that, in fact, up through:
"33 -- run away!
34 -- keep running!"

The bracket marking on chapter ten means that it looks like it's finished from here, but it's a bit short, so I might be able to make it fit more cool if I get out a really big mallet, and if I find some more cool lying around that looks like it might fit.

As I said, the only chapter that had no prose whatsoever this morning when I woke up was Chapter 28. Now it has a hundred words or so that will go in the middle of what goes there later, but it came to me now as I was scrolling, so I wrote it down now rather than hoping it sticks around for later in its particulars. One of the things I find interesting about this is that it's fairly clear that the exciting chapters are not all getting used up first or saved to last. I'm writing what's vivid and immediate to me at the moment, but that's sometimes exposition or quiet relationship moment, not just the big plotty things. But there's this: I seem to have written all the bits that make me sick to my stomach to write already. I suppose I generally do eat the cooked carrots first out of my pot pie, so that I'm left with crust and mushrooms at the end, and that seems to be what I've done here, too. But I didn't set out to do it; it just seemed like time.

So now I have 53K of book, plus a bright blue organizational sheet propped against my computer tower, and...all of the stuff ahead of me looks like fun to write, actually. Does that mean I have skipped the mid-book doldrums entirely? It might. I'm not celebrating that particular milestone yet. But I am cautiously optimistic.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

What I don't grok is how you can judge, from where you stand, that running away is going to require two chapters, or that fighting with the king won't stretch out to more than one. Etc.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, I already have a pretty substantial chunk of book here. So I can smell the rhythms of it. You know how you can feel in a book that you're reading that the ending is not going to be satisfying because there are only 30-some pages left and you smell that there are about 60-some pages of plot and the only way to get them into that 30-page bag is to really screw up or get really brilliant, and you know where your money is by that point in the book? It's that same sense that says that you won't need a separate chapter for the bat plot to be discovered. Only more so, because when I've written "fight with king" on the notes today, I've already written a couple hundred words of that fight, and I know what's not done yet and how the rest went.

Also I have a substantial notion, at this point, what actually happens for each short note -- what the difference is between "run away!" (making their escape) and "keep running!" (denouement on the high seas).

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

There should always be a denouement on the high seas.

[rose-and-ivy.livejournal.com]

I agree.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm more wondering about an earlier stage, when you start writing Chapter Seventeen, without having much stuff around it. Do you label it Chapter Seventeen right then? Or is it just "a bit that goes later-ish in the book," and it gets its number when more of the book has shown up around it?

In the normal course of things, I quite understand what you mean about that sense, though I wouldn't call it smelling the rhythm so much as <scrounges for own weirdly synaesthetic metaphor> seeing the density of it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, in the very early stages things go in roughly chronological order, so it'll be:
notes
[scene A]
notes
[scene B]
notes
[scene C]
notes

Then:
Chapter One
notes
Chapter Two
notes
Chapter Three
notes
[scene A]
notes

Or whatever.

Prose density is something I feel with my mouth rather than seeing, but I know what you mean.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

You are weird.

Smelling the rhythms is the only part of this that doesn't make me want to run away and keep running!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am at peace with my weird.

I'm probably not at peace with my wyrd yet, though. We'll see.

[rose-and-ivy.livejournal.com]

"33 -- run away!
34 -- keep running!"

I am STILL laughing over that. AND I'm in a public place. I think that gets extra extra points. Hehehehehe. XD XD

I love this! It's so fascinating - such a different way of writing a story. But it makes so much sense. And -- you may think me crazy -- but it sounds like SO much more fun than writing it beginning to end, sane-like. (Just kidding.)

I want to try that now! I've always had a problem with finishing longer stories, because I would get so bored with the story somehow and want to go gallivanting off with another. I'm not one to plan a story, so when I'd run out of ideas for one story I'd generally get a lot of ideas for another instead. But I don't know - something about writing it like you explained - it's like everything's there to some point, and with full written chapters ahead it seems somehow more manageable, you know? Like, you know where you're headed, and what it's going to be like when you get there, so it's easier to figure out where you need to be now. If that made any sense at all.

Come to think of it, one of the few longer stories I did finish, one of the first things I wrote was the ending.

Thanks for this!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm very glad this has been useful for you! I posted it precisely because of that: because for some people there is a very good reason to write things in chronological order (because that's how they can do it, or that's how they can do it well), but for others there isn't, and if you're one of the people for whom there's no good reason to write in order, well, why should you?

I do find it easier to know where I am if I know where I'm going. Probably this is a side effect of training in quantum mechanics, but there's no helping that now.

[irismoonlight.livejournal.com]

SQUEE! Thank you! I just did the same thing this week.
With the addition of Scene 6 will be scene one, Scene 1 will be scene 5, etc. I write out of order and have to rearrange things when I edit, but... I'm learning.

Thank you! (Got here by way of matociquala, btw)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Glad you enjoyed the post!

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

(here via matociquala)

I do much the same. Lately I've started using Word's "table of contents" feature as a quick cheat. The outline becomes the table of contents, and vice versa. I use long descriptive chapter headings, much like "A meets B; A bashes B's head with a stick", "February: B runs into A on Valentine's Day","some time before Christmas C makes pie", "Movable excised scene where A talks to C about cat personalities", and so on.

I then tell Word to form a table of contents from these chapter headings and sub-headings. (Oh, and I use different highlighting colors on the chapter headings for "empty", "draft" and "finished" too - the highlight translates up to the ToC so I can see at a glance what I need to work on.) This is very handy, because I can see it all in one place like an outline; I can get a rough idea of what scenes are how big by looking at page count; and very handy, click on the ToC chapter headings and go straight to that part of the manuscript. (Handy when the thing gets huge.)

Also, in outline format, it's ever so easy to drag that "movable" scene to March or whatever. (I don't always use a timeline, either, it's just a convenient way of explaining things here.) That way I can usually manage to shove an otherwise expository bit into a scene where the characters are already sitting around at a restaurant for plot reasons, and edit that conversation about cats to reflect that they're in a pizza joint.

This method may of course be a madness to you, but I thought it was worth mentioning, as it's been a big improvement on having a spare text file with the organizational sheet bits in there.

Sadly, I don't have your gift for writing the icky bits first. For me, the icky bits are the gristle of the book, the connective tissue that holds all those scenes together.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The highlight-colors thing sounds like an innovation to me!

This book is higher in icky-bits per unit book because there are people who can't trust other people they love, and that always makes me a bit fussed -- far more than connective tissue, which I mostly do pretty readily.

[dlganger.livejournal.com]

This is the way I've been writing technical books and whitepapers for the last four years: start with the outline, start filling in details until I'm getting to actual text, and highlight the status of each section with color coding.

I'm a bit surprised to see that method used for fiction, just because even though I tend to have a rough outline for my stories, I don't have nearly as firm a grasp on relevant details on my way through the first draft as I do for a technical book.

The novel I'm currently working on is simultaneously telling a story from two points in time separated by a century or so. I've been dithering on whether to work through chronologically or just work through the chapters in the order I think they go in.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The thing is, I don't acquire my grasp on relevant details in chronological order. I am as likely to learn what I need in order to write Chapter 5 by writing Chapter 18 as by writing Chapter 4.

[bobbacca.livejournal.com]

I found that very intriguing. I think I'll have to try that with my book; I might actually finish it that way. I have all these ideas for places and scenes and know why the characters are there and what they're doing there and what happens to them, but no clue as to what comes in between or how they get from one place to the next. I wrote the opening fine and the protagonists' escape from town, but I've been frozen there for months because I have no idea how to get them to where they're supposed to be next.

I've read a lot of books on writing, and while none of them ever said that you have to write in chronological order, none of them said it was ok not to write in chronological order either, and so I never even thought of it. But if I just start writing the parts I know, I might actually get a half-decent sense of what's going on in between. (For me, the icky bits are definitely the connective bits.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

What could it hurt? If you're stuck already, trying a different angle may get you started again -- and if it doesn't, it may illuminate the nature of the problem more clearly. Glad to be useful!