Comments on: is it morning already?

By: Kristine Smith

Kristine Smith — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:02:04 +0000

I am worried that much of my out-of-sequence writing will need to be jettisoned when the rest of the book catches up. That’s how it’s worked in the past, no matter how sure I was that the oos stuff would fit.

Good luck with your rearranging. I think what I’ve done so far works better. Fingers crossed.

By: Laura Reeve

Laura Reeve — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:06:38 +0000

Good luck, Kristine. The non-linear approach works for some people, but not for me. The problem is that I have to arrive upon the scene with the same preparation as the POV character (e.g. with their history, mood, information) and I can’t seem to do that without writing linearly.

Surprisingly, I’m in a similar spot although I don’t have as much wordage going for me. I’m trying to start book #3 (contracted, for a series), but my beginning is really flat. I’m rearranging and rewriting the first couple chapters to send with a synopsis, so I can convince my editor that I know where I’m going

By: Kristine

Kristine — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 01:50:22 +0000

Sometimes writing what wants to be written is fun, too, and you really need to have fun. Makes up for all the times when you don’t.

By: Jessica De Milo

Jessica De Milo — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:00:20 +0000

While there are always issues for me about things fitting together at the end, I don’t think that makes writing the ‘easy scenes’ first a bad idea. I picked up a book on *how to be a straight A student* when last I was at B&N, and a test-taking stratagy it laid out (which I assumed everyone knew) was to do the problems you felt confident about first. I feel like the same stratagy works for my writing. If there is a scene I want to write, it would be foolish to make it sit on the back shelf of my brain and let it collect dust when I can just put it down on paper. I often find that in writing what wants to be written (as you so beautifully put it) I work out the difficult parts, and much faster than I would have if I’d have forced myself to slog through them when there were other things ready for the writing.

By: Kristine Smith

Kristine Smith — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:38:12 +0000

Karen–I hope the String Theory works. I haven’t used it for any previous books, but I did use it for a novella I wrote a couple of years ago. It worked then. The book is only, oh, 4x longer…

Adam–non-linear scenes go south for me in the same way. I write them ahead of time, they make perfect sense, but by the time the rest of the story catches up, they no longer fit.

Hope things are different this time.

By: Adam Heine

Adam Heine — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:11:51 +0000

I like hearing other people’s methods of writing, even if I don’t understand them I outline, and I write linearly. I can’t not, because the outline tells me where I’m headed, but all the details get filled in as I go, and it’s the details that make the major scenes what they are.

Example: I wrote (non-linearly) a particular scene where the protag meets his Old Wise Man. He sat at a computer in the basement of a Middle Eastern town, helping the good guys secretly via what was left of the internet (it’s a post-apocalypse story).

When I finally got to that scene for real, a million details made the original version impossible. In particular, the OWM lived *with* the good guys in a cave in Southern California, and the internet (actually, all infrastructure) had been destroyed.

A lot of the dialogue stuck though. So I see how it helped, but I’m not a rewriter. No more than I have to be, I guess. Maybe one day I’ll learn.

By: Karen Wester Newton

Karen Wester Newton — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:16:28 +0000

It always seemed to me that writing habits were like water—they take their shape from the vessel they’re poured into. Some people write best at 4:00 am, a time at which I am border on catatonic. Even after a day at work, I get a second wind around 8:00 or 9:00 pm and write productively from then to whenever I get sleepy (which is much earlier these days than it used to be). Some people outline meticulously, and some just start at the beginning and write to the end. I think the best way is the one that works. If you can write the bits and then string them together into a story after the fact, then more power to you.