One of the perils of plotting (versus pantsing) is that the story doesn’t always cooperate with your outline. Very rude of it to do that, by the way, but what can you expect from a bunch of half-baked pixels on a screen, or worse, ink on a page?
It’s even weirder in my case, because I don’t always write scenes in the order they appear in the book. So I have a story in my head, but I bounce and forth between beginning, middle, and end, somewhat at random. This isn’t the case for all my stories, thank goodness, or I’d’ve been consigned to the loony bin a long time ago. But it happens often enough to notice the pattern.
The time travel WIP is a major producer of writing that doesn’t cooperate with the outline, usually in the form of really fun-to-write, interesting, character-building conversations and events that…
… can’t be included in that part of the story. The characters talk about things they don’t know yet, act in ways that would be unrealistic or out of character for them at that point in the story, or a piece of information slips that negates a later chunk of the plot or the emotional tension. I’m writing the scenes out of order, and apparently some of the character development lingers in my subconscious when I go from a later scene to an earlier one.
So, you say, stop doing that. Write the darned scenes in order.
Yes, thanks. I’ve tried that. It doesn’t work; I just stop writing altogether. This phenomenon only happens in the stories that are ‘given’ to me; they appear in my head, with large portions of the characters and plot fleshed out, and I have to look at them from different angles over time to get the rest. Any outline I make is more of a record of what’s in my head, because these tend to be vast sweeping epics and it’s hard to hold that much information in my head at one time, so I outsource it to the page.
This type of story tends to give me multiple dueling outlines, family trees, histories in some cases, and a lot of unusable dross I have to separate from the gold.
What’s a poor writer to do?- since acquiring a new, better brain is difficult and unethical?
Take all the fun but unusable bits of writing, and put them in an ‘extras’ file. Sometimes they can be mined for ideas later on, or you might realize that it’s more usable than you thought; it just needed some editing. If the story or series goes big, you can give readers an extra treat of ‘deleted scenes’ that aren’t canon but they are fun.
Depending on the type and scope of your unusable writing, you can also, just, roll with it. Keep writing as though, ‘I meant to do that!’ and see where the story goes. You may find that the final product is better than what you had before. Maybe your subconscious mind saw something in the story that your conscious mind didn’t. I’ve done that a few times, and it usually-but-not-always improves the story.
Another form of ‘just roll with it’ is to induce the kind of random bouncing around that’s so annoying in other contexts. One of my other WIPs does this in the form of alternating scenes of past and present, telling the story from first the matriarch’s perspective when she was young, then from her descendants’ perspective in the present day.
So, dear reader, tell me: do you write scenes in order or out of order? Do you always write one way or the other, or does it vary by story/series/genre/etc.? What do you do when you write something that takes a ninety-degree turn from the direction you thought the story was going?
(Apropos of nothing, I struggled with this post title for the simple reason that ‘rebel’ looks like a noun to me even when it’s a verb. Ah, the vagaries of English. I shall complain to the manager. In my copious spare time.)
Mad Genius Club 
10 responses to “When Stories Rebel”
I sometimes skip scenes if my brain just doesn’t want to go there. So I’ll do [fill in dinner and dance, social disaster] and then jump to the next bit, and go back later. In this case, I don’t remember enough about formal Victorian British regimental social events, and need to dig out the book and go from there.
Some days, I need to write something to unload my brain or emotions, so I’ll do one of the fight scenes, or something else, and then I can go back. But I try to tag the extra bit so I remember where it goes!
I write at the series level, with multiple entries stewing at the same time. When I ruminate on characters/plot, mostly in bed, I get back scene-snippets or motivational insights, specific to a particular prospective series entry. Hence the need for pen & paper at bedside — the resultant notes end up in a series-entry-specific file of such notes, and when I go to write that entry, the first thing to do is to go through all those notes and re-rationalize them in context in a loose outline.
I find that innovations that occur to me that are specific to earlier entries fade away as that part of the story becomes solid in my head (and on paper), even if it isn’t yet published or written. This is a good thing, since it lets me publish (or at least rely upon as firm) earlier entries before I know everything about where a series is going. The more I can internalize the important events of the series in progress, the more I can make use of “Oh! Of course! THAT’S how that event/character motivation works, and the impact/implications it has…”
But it was scary for my first series. I had to learn to rely upon my subconscious in this regard, as I published each entry in a series, to trust that I would not wander off into a quicksand with a later entry that I could not somehow rationalize and fit in, in hindsight.
I usually try to write in order, but sometimes I have cases where the storyline just won’t come in order. And when I’m dictating on long drives, I have to go with with whatever part is most vivid in my mind at that point). Like you, writing nonlinearly is just an unfortunate necessity. I spend a lot of time scribbling notes on paper about how to get from *here* to *there* after it happens.
I’ve tended to write things out of order.
However, I’ve found I must not write the climactic scene before I’m done with the rest of it, because that seems to stop the story.
All the bits that don’t fit, I just dump into another file. A good chunk of them are things that still happened in universe, but weren’t important to the story. Some of them I’ve ended up reusing in other contexts. There was an opening that was dragging one short down, that I ended up removing from that one, that ended up being the right open for a different short.
And if I ever get back to the w(n)ip, I’m going to have to read through all of the dump files I generated for it to get back into the story I was writing.
I’ve tended to write in order. but I usually have an outline, either in my mind, or written down. Sometimes, though — I have an idea for a scene or a key encounter somewhere farther along in the plot, and I will skip ahead and write that bit while it is fresh and vivid in my mind — and fill in the other intervening bits later.
“One of the perils of plotting (versus pantsing) is that the story doesn’t always cooperate with your outline.”
Yes, my “outlines” such as they are never survive contact with the characters. My first book, Unfair Advantage, took a very long time to write because I was trying to do it “The Right Way”, where you have an outline, and the characters are thought out ahead of time, and you move all the pieces around like a chess game.
I had no idea who I was dealing with. The characters themselves decided how things were going to go. I had to go back to stuff I’d already written and add parts that explained crazy things that happened later. I had to delete other things because they would never do that. My rough outline of how the story was meant to go, they all laughed and said it wasn’t happening.
So I ended up doing everything the wrong way, and it took longer but it all worked out eventually.
Now, obviously this is all happening inside my head and on the keyboard. I can blame it on Beatrice and Charlotte and George, but the truth of the matter is that outlines don’t work for me. Deciding all the scenes and writing to a plan, I can’t do it. I have to figure it all out as I go along.
Current WIP as an example, I don’t even know who the bad guy is yet, or if there is one at all. The characters have all gone haring off after some nebulous Something that was bothering them, and I’m following behind trying to figure out what they’re doing. I’m sure it’ll all work out, but right now I have No Idea what’s up.
Some people seem to like the end result though, so I guess I’ll keep going. ~:D
When a scene is in my head, I write it. If I don’t…later, when I ‘should’ write that scene, it’s not there. I write in a working file, transfer text to a more permanent file when a couple dozen paragraphs are finished, and then create chapter files when each one is completed. Out-of-order scenes go to the ‘later’ part of the working file, roughly organized by time. ‘Lemme see, this happens after Foo but before Bar so it goes about here’. When I reach the point where a scene goes I grab it, drop it in, and then go about cementing it in place.
In my first story, I had chapters 7, 9, 11 and 12 finished before chapter 5. When I got to them, they needed some minor revisions, but no big deal.
I find myself wanting to write the good bits. The important bits. The routine bits between them, not so much. That’s a slog, no matter how necessary they are.
I write my very rough first draft, also known as an outline, out of order if that’s the way the story goes.
For writing what other people would call the first draft, let’s see — I put the meme in this:
https://writingandreflections.substack.com/p/my-writing-process
I’m surprised to find so many other people who can/do write out of order; I thought I was in a club of one!
At what point do we need a secret handshake? I never know the etiquette for these things.
It’s an expression of defeat, in that we can’t bludgeon our brain into working in the orderly way we think it should (as if this were a mechanical object). So the brain wins, and we have to come up with workarounds that the brain will accept, to let us get on with the job, and we find that kinda embarrassing outside of creative circles… 🙂
That’s my claim and I’m stickin’ to it.